Being more concerned about playing your PS3 and scoring weed, rather than helping to develop genetic treatments for certain forms of cancer, is a barrier.
This stereotype doesn't hold water either. I had a roomate in college who played video games, read comic books and graphic novels, rode his skateboard to school (still!), ran into trees at high speed on his snowboard, smoked pot and got drunk regularly, and had obviously done too much speed in high school (by his own admittance). He had a striking resemblance to Keanu Reeves in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", both in looks and behavior (his eyes were permanently droopy and he said "dude" a lot). The choice between college and becoming a professional skateboarder was appearantly a narrow one (possibly influenced by cracking his skull, sans helmet, in an empty pool on his skateboard). Unfortunately for your theory, he ended up getting a double major in math and chemistry with highest honors, and got accepted to PhD programs at UC Berkeley, CalTech and MIT. (I think he chose Berkeley.) Today you can call him "Doctor Ted", he almost certainly makes more money than you (or me), and he may well be discovering new cancer treatments as we speak.
In fact, most people I know have smoked pot, and most SMART people I know play video games at least some of the time.
Being devoutly religious isn't necessarily a barrier to "accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions, nor to participating in advanced research", but very often it is. Probably a lot more often than smoking pot or playing video games.
OK, in anticipation of an argument on this one... initially the latest drugs are very expensive, until the patents expire at which time generics become available to the "unwashed masses". The high initial prices are what fund the development of the new, expensive, but soon to be affordable, drugs of the future
The pharmaceutical companies of course want you to believe that. In reality, the high initial prices fund massive marketing efforts in order to boost profits to even more exorbitant levels. The R&D expenses, while high, pale compared to the marketing expenses or profits.
Well then THAT would be the place to address the problem, not by making it harder for companies to find qualified employees and by making it harder for prospective job hunters to find jobs.
FYI, I was given an astigmatic correction soft contact for one eye (the other wasn't so bad, so didn't need it) when I first got contacts in about 1982 or 1983. They are also known as "toric" lenses.
Indeed. One of the studies recently that was purporting to show some kind of bad reaction to violent video games based on brain scans I think pretty clearly showed the exactly opposite of what it was being painted as. (It was saying that "violent" video games caused a decrease in emotional processing and an increase in cognitive processing. Which is sort of what one would expect during complex problem solving; it would have worried me if they'd seen the opposite result, that the gamer stopped thinking intellectually and started getting worked up emotionally. It was pretty clear both the researchers and the writers of the various articles about it had an agenda up front and no matter the results they were going to interpret it in the same way.)
It's doubtful that this is really her cause, or that she particularly dislikes those games.
Instead, Hillary has made a political judgement that borderline-Republican voters might be attracted enough by these proposals to get her into higher office, to fight for the things she REALLY thinks are important (health care, tax rate, nation-building, pollution, abortion, etc). The game thing is just a smoke screen.
Her recent support for criminalizing flag-burning is similar: a transparent bid to trade some of her beliefs for a little electability.
And as a result, some Democrats will stop supporting her (like me). This is why the Democrats have done so poorly in recent years: they don't stand for anything (and thus don't really represent anyone) and gain precious few converts from the Republican side anyway. If Hillary wants to espouse Republican views, she should switch parties.
The same reason that Hotmail's spam to its customers cannot be unsubscribed from, or reported to Hotmail as spam (they actually say something to the effect of "if you don't like our spam, you should discontinue using Hotmail").
I fully agree with this. And I don't think games really ARE ignoring the wider market: there have been endless comments on how many web games are very popular amongst audiences not traditionally interested in computer or video gaming, plus there have been exceptions over the years, such as Myst.
As others have pointed out, that is an incomplete, and thus inaccurate, financial comparison. Of course that is very typical of such comparisons, most of which leave out the residual sale value of the car, and in this particular case even leaves out government incentives (including the possible advantages of free parking or using carpool lanes, which could save not only money, including bypassing bridge tolls and parking fees, but time, which can be equated to the same thing). While it does mention these things almost as footnotes, in typical fashion this one stacks the deck against the hybrid in some important respects in its main calculations, making a hybrid seem like a waste of money when it really might not be.
(This may also be true of solar power: such analyses generally omit any possible increase in the selling value of the home as a result of the solar system. It's even plausible such systems could sometimes pay for themselves in the long run due to increased home value alone, let alone any energy savings in the meantime, but the people appearantly trying to discredit such technology usually don't want to look at those numbers.)
In addition, as has also been pointed out, why on earth is energy-saving technology the only area that people should be forced to justify their purchases based on economic return? How do you justify that fancy paint job, those snazzy wheels, that killer stereo, that funky spoiler, that leather trim, or any number of other fairly useless features that increase the purchase price of a car? (Or even the 300 horsepower engine - it can tangibly increase acceleration capability, but what is the economic value of having faster acceleration? Is that benefit worth the increased cost of the car and increased fuel use?) How could anyone ever possibly justify buying a $70,000 Porsche, Mercedes or Hummer? Where are the demands for economic or financial analyses to justify the cost effectiveness of those vehicles? (And ditto for many factors affecting the price of a home, or any other purchase.)
"LumiLED has a lofty goal: solving all the problems inherent in static displays on LCD monitors. In other words, the goal is not to improve responsiveness, but to work on color rendering and the richness of hues."
This is somewhat true, but less so now. There is a lot of music from the early 20th century, up through the '50s especially, that is very popular but may still be under copyright. This may include works by composers like Stravinsky, Sibelius, R. Strauss, Bartok, Vaughan-Williams, Bernstein, Copland, Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, Gershwin, and many more. (I'm not sure of the status of each specific work, which depends on when they were published and I guess which country.)
I'm not sure I agree with your latter point. I think you significantly exaggerate how much money classical artists make from recordings. For those dealing with the major labels, the economics are similar to pop artsits, but keep in mind that in most cases, they are selling less than 10,000 CDs. In many cases, they're lucky to hit 1,000 in sales.
I think it's more frequent that classical recordings lose money just as the concerts do. The record companies overall make just enough profit to continue (usually - the major labels stopped recording US orchestras entirely some years ago since it's too expensive, and have not started up again to this day), but I don't think anyone outside of the Three Tenors or Charlotte Church are getting rich off of it (and maybe not even then - again, they probably make far more off of concerts than recordings), and this is regardless of whether they need to pay royalties on the composition or not. And even when they do record, often they need support from grants just to make the recording (particularly for orchestral or opera recordings, which are expensive to make).
It may be different in Europe, but I wouldn't assume this is the case even there: the BBC is now giving away material from their archives (note: they own several orchestras I believe, and have tons of music in their archives), and Naxos allows downloads of their entire catalog for a rather modest fee (or 1/4 of each track in the catalog for free). (Naxos also happens to sell classical CDs at very reasonable prices in the first place, like probably $5-10 average.) In addition, other than independent labels with widely varying prices, the majors seem more and more to be focusing on crossover stuff with sex appeal or whatever. It barely qualifies as "classical" any more.
This is a very interesting point. If all a user gets are the poisoned/garbage data FREELY SUPPLIED BY HBO, then they would likely have a solid defense. They would have to have downloaded portions of the actual show in order for there to be infringement that they couldn't easily defend against.
So HBO slows down downloads, and sends threatening letters to scare people into complying, but if what people actually downloaded was the data freely provided by HBO, I don't think HBO would have a case that could stand up. And, unless HBO gets access (via warrant) the regular tracker logs and the user's computer to prove that they actually downloaded a copy of the actual show, the only thing they could prove is that the user downloaded the garbage data HBO freely provided (perhaps out of curiosity to see what the "garbage" consisted of after hearing about what HBO was doing). Hence, no case.
Yup. I had to download a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica because I'd missed them and, despite searching the schedule hour by hour for the entire week+ ahead, it was appearant they weren't going to re-run them any time soon.
My basic choice was: download a few of the episodes I'd missed, or stop watching the show entirely. I figure it's better for Sci-Fi (the channel showing it in the US, and a channel which I do get as part of my satellite package) for me to keep watching the show than to lose me.
(Furthermore, appearantly the free publicity gained by people in the US watching BitTorrents of the UK airing, which came months earlier, built up a huge amount of demand for the show that might not have otherwise existed.)
I'd much rather get the shows off TV and record them to the DVR than download them over the internet (it's usually faster and the quality is better).
It's iffy whether people who DON'T pay for the channel in question should get free access, but I believe (and most past studies that I've heared of confirm) that the channels (or recording artists, or whoever) have more to gain by the free publicity than they have to lose by lost sales.
For instance, the theory that sports teams should blackout home games locally turns out to be flat wrong: they gain more ticket sales as a result of the publicity than they lose by people choosing to stay home instead of paying for a ticket and going to the game.
"Lexmark discounts certain cartridges with the understanding that the user will return the spent cartridges to Lexmark. Lexmark recycles the cartridges and sells them again. Lexmark got their panties in a bunch because another company was taking their prebated cartridges and recycling them, causing Lexmark to lose money. Lexmark isn't being quite as evil as they are made out to be, in this case."
Sure they are. If they wanted to do that the right way, they'd offer coupons for discounts on purchases of new cartridges to anyone who returns an old one. No need to be dicks about it. They're just fishing for ways to legally put their competitors out of business so they can overcharge their customers even more than they do already.
The problem with Divx was that you could already rent the same video from Blockbuster for like $3, and keep it for longer than 48 hours (a full week in many cases), and watch it as many times as you wanted during that period. So why pay 50% more for less potential usability?
Proponents of time-limited DRM have to acknowledge that if they want it to work like a rental, they won't be able to charge more than a rental, either. Not that $4.50 is the usual price of a full purchase, but it would have needed to be well under $4 to have any appeal. And unless the re-rental fee for further viewing were lower still (say, $1 to unlock it for a 24-hour period), people would probably find it as appealing to toss the thing in the garbage when the 48 hours expired rather than keep a bunch of extra non-usable DVDs around for future viewing for more exorbitant charges. Which makes sense if all they're throwing in the garbage is bits on a hard drive that they'd downloaded, but not if it's a physical disk. Otherwise, they'd just wait until the thing was on sale for $9 and buy it, and never have to pay to watch it again.
It seems to me this means that the more the US government resorts to taking away its citizens' freedoms in order to "combat" terrorism, the more it becomes terroristic itself.
Actually I doubt that public domain availability of a movie containing Mickey Mouse would necessary dilute that trademark - Disney could still sue for trademark infringement over certain uses of the name "Mickey Mouse" or its likeness.
How to handle derivitave works stemming from a particular movie might be trickier, but still wouldn't necessarily dilute the trademark any more than showing the golden arches in movies or on TV dilutes McDonalds' trademark.
As opposed to copyrights and patents, the main intent of trademarks is to prevent confusion in the marketplace, so that consumers can recognize which company or product they are dealing with. So long as such confusion is avoided, there shouldn't be a problem.
If they choose to screw around rather than doing their homework, they're probably going to fail their classes, no? And if they're failing to do the required work, you focus on that. Say "do what else you want with your time, but do get your homework done." Some of them DID say that certain teachers used game playing etc. as a reward for finishing work, and that it was very effective.
Porn I can agree should be kept off those computers, and there would probably be some jousting between students and tech support over this, but the draconian lockdowns do NOTHING but taunt the kids into breaking the rules. (Even these kids were operating under self-imposed rules, such as not messing with the server, not deleting any programs, etc.)
It's the arrogance of "educators" that usually gets in the way. Once they start trying to prevent the kids from messing around a little, it can turn into a war (and a source of entertainment for the kids, as well as a distraction from their actual schoolwork), then the teachers/administrators can say "see, I told you so, they only want to fool around and distrupt things, they don't want to learn".
Regardless, I bet those kids learned more constructive skills during that schoolyear from the hacking and yes, from playing computer games (not to mention dealing with the stupidity and arrogance of the people in power), than they were likely to learn in their classes.
Why lock the damn things down in the first place? The people who should be charged with a crime are the idiots trying to interfere with the kids learning constructive skills. Lock down the servers and administrative files, but let the kids do with the individual computers what they will, other than downloading/storing porn or illegal materials, launching cyberattacks, etc. So long as they still do all their schoolwork etc., what's the harm?
Certainly today's situation of applying a 3D interface to baiscally low-resolution 2D material doesn't always look too great, but that doesn't have to be a problem in the future or if the system is designed around it. For instance, there's no reason for fonts, window borders, line-art icons, and other elements not to be resolution-independent vector graphics. These can scale to any size or be displayed at any angle using the full resolution of the screen (and appropriate anti-aliiasing) without ever becoming blurry or distorted. The only things that wouldn't be are bitmapped images (photos).
I don't think that there's any need for actual 3D displays (eye goggles or whatever) in order for the interface to become 3D, any more than 3D games (Quake, etc.) need 3D displays.
There are a lot of practical issues with how to be able to see everything you've got working, easily zoom in to scrutinize or manipulate a particular object, then zoom back out to select something else. Expose is one fairly good way of doing it, but I see it as just a stopgap, prolonging the 2D interface longer but not really being the long-term solution. The usual 2D interface in Windows and traditional Macintosh isn't so great, though generally worlds better than command lines, and not bad as 2D interfaces go. (And don't forget, even as recently as 10 years ago there were hordes of people defending the command line, saying they didn't need icons, menus, windows, or a mouse...)
But in many ways a spatial (and hence 3D) interface may be the best solution in the long term. This Sphere 3D interface is conceptually about as good as I've seen, but so far it's obviously just a rough demo of the concept, rather than something really practical.
For this to be successful, it needs to be fully integrated into the system (full functionality from within the 3D interface, including background windows that continue to update and are open to manipulation), graphics need to be high quality (vector graphics wherever possible, plus good anti-aliasing and filtering), performance must be quick, smooth, and precise, and the interface for controlling the environment (rotating, zooming, etc.) must also be smooth, precise, easy to learn, standardized, and not interfere with other functionality of the system (pointing within windows, entering text, right-click menus, etc.)
Control interface standardization is possibly one of the most unpredictable and challenging aspects. I'm not sure anyone would have predicted 10 years ago that "wasd" would become the standard interface for nearly all first-person 3D computer games aside from flight simulators (w=move forward, a=sidestep left, d=sidestep right, and s=move backward, using the mouse to aim in a polar manner). But now that it has, most gamers with some experience can sit down to any new first-person game and instantly have excellent movement and aiming skills, whereas in the old days it took considerable time to master the control scheme of each individual game. (This arrangement has become so ingrained, it's also used for control in many non-first-person games as well.)
At any rate, I see the popular rejection of 3D interfaces by many pundits to be a combination of a failure of imagination with the unpolished state of most current examples.
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In fact, most people I know have smoked pot, and most SMART people I know play video games at least some of the time.
Being devoutly religious isn't necessarily a barrier to "accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions, nor to participating in advanced research", but very often it is. Probably a lot more often than smoking pot or playing video games.
Cylons.
Well then THAT would be the place to address the problem, not by making it harder for companies to find qualified employees and by making it harder for prospective job hunters to find jobs.
FYI, I was given an astigmatic correction soft contact for one eye (the other wasn't so bad, so didn't need it) when I first got contacts in about 1982 or 1983. They are also known as "toric" lenses.
Indeed. One of the studies recently that was purporting to show some kind of bad reaction to violent video games based on brain scans I think pretty clearly showed the exactly opposite of what it was being painted as. (It was saying that "violent" video games caused a decrease in emotional processing and an increase in cognitive processing. Which is sort of what one would expect during complex problem solving; it would have worried me if they'd seen the opposite result, that the gamer stopped thinking intellectually and started getting worked up emotionally. It was pretty clear both the researchers and the writers of the various articles about it had an agenda up front and no matter the results they were going to interpret it in the same way.)
It's doubtful that this is really her cause, or that she particularly dislikes those games.
Instead, Hillary has made a political judgement that borderline-Republican voters might be attracted enough by these proposals to get her into higher office, to fight for the things she REALLY thinks are important (health care, tax rate, nation-building, pollution, abortion, etc). The game thing is just a smoke screen.
Her recent support for criminalizing flag-burning is similar: a transparent bid to trade some of her beliefs for a little electability.
And as a result, some Democrats will stop supporting her (like me). This is why the Democrats have done so poorly in recent years: they don't stand for anything (and thus don't really represent anyone) and gain precious few converts from the Republican side anyway. If Hillary wants to espouse Republican views, she should switch parties.
I use Trillian also, and they WERE added to mine. :(
The same reason that Hotmail's spam to its customers cannot be unsubscribed from, or reported to Hotmail as spam (they actually say something to the effect of "if you don't like our spam, you should discontinue using Hotmail").
I fully agree with this. And I don't think games really ARE ignoring the wider market: there have been endless comments on how many web games are very popular amongst audiences not traditionally interested in computer or video gaming, plus there have been exceptions over the years, such as Myst.
As others have pointed out, that is an incomplete, and thus inaccurate, financial comparison. Of course that is very typical of such comparisons, most of which leave out the residual sale value of the car, and in this particular case even leaves out government incentives (including the possible advantages of free parking or using carpool lanes, which could save not only money, including bypassing bridge tolls and parking fees, but time, which can be equated to the same thing). While it does mention these things almost as footnotes, in typical fashion this one stacks the deck against the hybrid in some important respects in its main calculations, making a hybrid seem like a waste of money when it really might not be.
(This may also be true of solar power: such analyses generally omit any possible increase in the selling value of the home as a result of the solar system. It's even plausible such systems could sometimes pay for themselves in the long run due to increased home value alone, let alone any energy savings in the meantime, but the people appearantly trying to discredit such technology usually don't want to look at those numbers.)
In addition, as has also been pointed out, why on earth is energy-saving technology the only area that people should be forced to justify their purchases based on economic return? How do you justify that fancy paint job, those snazzy wheels, that killer stereo, that funky spoiler, that leather trim, or any number of other fairly useless features that increase the purchase price of a car? (Or even the 300 horsepower engine - it can tangibly increase acceleration capability, but what is the economic value of having faster acceleration? Is that benefit worth the increased cost of the car and increased fuel use?) How could anyone ever possibly justify buying a $70,000 Porsche, Mercedes or Hummer? Where are the demands for economic or financial analyses to justify the cost effectiveness of those vehicles? (And ditto for many factors affecting the price of a home, or any other purchase.)
Might want to check out this review:
/ index.html
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20051028
"LumiLED has a lofty goal: solving all the problems inherent in static displays on LCD monitors. In other words, the goal is not to improve responsiveness, but to work on color rendering and the richness of hues."
Yes, Tom's Hardware reviewed this very model back in June:
/ viewsonic-05.html
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/display/20050602
This is somewhat true, but less so now. There is a lot of music from the early 20th century, up through the '50s especially, that is very popular but may still be under copyright. This may include works by composers like Stravinsky, Sibelius, R. Strauss, Bartok, Vaughan-Williams, Bernstein, Copland, Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, Gershwin, and many more. (I'm not sure of the status of each specific work, which depends on when they were published and I guess which country.)
I'm not sure I agree with your latter point. I think you significantly exaggerate how much money classical artists make from recordings. For those dealing with the major labels, the economics are similar to pop artsits, but keep in mind that in most cases, they are selling less than 10,000 CDs. In many cases, they're lucky to hit 1,000 in sales.
I think it's more frequent that classical recordings lose money just as the concerts do. The record companies overall make just enough profit to continue (usually - the major labels stopped recording US orchestras entirely some years ago since it's too expensive, and have not started up again to this day), but I don't think anyone outside of the Three Tenors or Charlotte Church are getting rich off of it (and maybe not even then - again, they probably make far more off of concerts than recordings), and this is regardless of whether they need to pay royalties on the composition or not. And even when they do record, often they need support from grants just to make the recording (particularly for orchestral or opera recordings, which are expensive to make).
It may be different in Europe, but I wouldn't assume this is the case even there: the BBC is now giving away material from their archives (note: they own several orchestras I believe, and have tons of music in their archives), and Naxos allows downloads of their entire catalog for a rather modest fee (or 1/4 of each track in the catalog for free). (Naxos also happens to sell classical CDs at very reasonable prices in the first place, like probably $5-10 average.) In addition, other than independent labels with widely varying prices, the majors seem more and more to be focusing on crossover stuff with sex appeal or whatever. It barely qualifies as "classical" any more.
This is a very interesting point. If all a user gets are the poisoned/garbage data FREELY SUPPLIED BY HBO, then they would likely have a solid defense. They would have to have downloaded portions of the actual show in order for there to be infringement that they couldn't easily defend against.
So HBO slows down downloads, and sends threatening letters to scare people into complying, but if what people actually downloaded was the data freely provided by HBO, I don't think HBO would have a case that could stand up. And, unless HBO gets access (via warrant) the regular tracker logs and the user's computer to prove that they actually downloaded a copy of the actual show, the only thing they could prove is that the user downloaded the garbage data HBO freely provided (perhaps out of curiosity to see what the "garbage" consisted of after hearing about what HBO was doing). Hence, no case.
Yup. I had to download a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica because I'd missed them and, despite searching the schedule hour by hour for the entire week+ ahead, it was appearant they weren't going to re-run them any time soon.
My basic choice was: download a few of the episodes I'd missed, or stop watching the show entirely. I figure it's better for Sci-Fi (the channel showing it in the US, and a channel which I do get as part of my satellite package) for me to keep watching the show than to lose me.
(Furthermore, appearantly the free publicity gained by people in the US watching BitTorrents of the UK airing, which came months earlier, built up a huge amount of demand for the show that might not have otherwise existed.)
I'd much rather get the shows off TV and record them to the DVR than download them over the internet (it's usually faster and the quality is better).
It's iffy whether people who DON'T pay for the channel in question should get free access, but I believe (and most past studies that I've heared of confirm) that the channels (or recording artists, or whoever) have more to gain by the free publicity than they have to lose by lost sales.
For instance, the theory that sports teams should blackout home games locally turns out to be flat wrong: they gain more ticket sales as a result of the publicity than they lose by people choosing to stay home instead of paying for a ticket and going to the game.
"Lexmark discounts certain cartridges with the understanding that the user will return the spent cartridges to Lexmark. Lexmark recycles the cartridges and sells them again. Lexmark got their panties in a bunch because another company was taking their prebated cartridges and recycling them, causing Lexmark to lose money. Lexmark isn't being quite as evil as they are made out to be, in this case."
Sure they are. If they wanted to do that the right way, they'd offer coupons for discounts on purchases of new cartridges to anyone who returns an old one. No need to be dicks about it. They're just fishing for ways to legally put their competitors out of business so they can overcharge their customers even more than they do already.
The problem with Divx was that you could already rent the same video from Blockbuster for like $3, and keep it for longer than 48 hours (a full week in many cases), and watch it as many times as you wanted during that period. So why pay 50% more for less potential usability? Proponents of time-limited DRM have to acknowledge that if they want it to work like a rental, they won't be able to charge more than a rental, either. Not that $4.50 is the usual price of a full purchase, but it would have needed to be well under $4 to have any appeal. And unless the re-rental fee for further viewing were lower still (say, $1 to unlock it for a 24-hour period), people would probably find it as appealing to toss the thing in the garbage when the 48 hours expired rather than keep a bunch of extra non-usable DVDs around for future viewing for more exorbitant charges. Which makes sense if all they're throwing in the garbage is bits on a hard drive that they'd downloaded, but not if it's a physical disk. Otherwise, they'd just wait until the thing was on sale for $9 and buy it, and never have to pay to watch it again.
It seems to me this means that the more the US government resorts to taking away its citizens' freedoms in order to "combat" terrorism, the more it becomes terroristic itself.
Right? How could this not be a joke?
Actually I doubt that public domain availability of a movie containing Mickey Mouse would necessary dilute that trademark - Disney could still sue for trademark infringement over certain uses of the name "Mickey Mouse" or its likeness.
How to handle derivitave works stemming from a particular movie might be trickier, but still wouldn't necessarily dilute the trademark any more than showing the golden arches in movies or on TV dilutes McDonalds' trademark.
As opposed to copyrights and patents, the main intent of trademarks is to prevent confusion in the marketplace, so that consumers can recognize which company or product they are dealing with. So long as such confusion is avoided, there shouldn't be a problem.
If they choose to screw around rather than doing their homework, they're probably going to fail their classes, no? And if they're failing to do the required work, you focus on that. Say "do what else you want with your time, but do get your homework done." Some of them DID say that certain teachers used game playing etc. as a reward for finishing work, and that it was very effective.
Porn I can agree should be kept off those computers, and there would probably be some jousting between students and tech support over this, but the draconian lockdowns do NOTHING but taunt the kids into breaking the rules. (Even these kids were operating under self-imposed rules, such as not messing with the server, not deleting any programs, etc.)
It's the arrogance of "educators" that usually gets in the way. Once they start trying to prevent the kids from messing around a little, it can turn into a war (and a source of entertainment for the kids, as well as a distraction from their actual schoolwork), then the teachers/administrators can say "see, I told you so, they only want to fool around and distrupt things, they don't want to learn".
Regardless, I bet those kids learned more constructive skills during that schoolyear from the hacking and yes, from playing computer games (not to mention dealing with the stupidity and arrogance of the people in power), than they were likely to learn in their classes.
Why lock the damn things down in the first place? The people who should be charged with a crime are the idiots trying to interfere with the kids learning constructive skills. Lock down the servers and administrative files, but let the kids do with the individual computers what they will, other than downloading/storing porn or illegal materials, launching cyberattacks, etc. So long as they still do all their schoolwork etc., what's the harm?
Certainly today's situation of applying a 3D interface to baiscally low-resolution 2D material doesn't always look too great, but that doesn't have to be a problem in the future or if the system is designed around it. For instance, there's no reason for fonts, window borders, line-art icons, and other elements not to be resolution-independent vector graphics. These can scale to any size or be displayed at any angle using the full resolution of the screen (and appropriate anti-aliiasing) without ever becoming blurry or distorted. The only things that wouldn't be are bitmapped images (photos).
I don't think that there's any need for actual 3D displays (eye goggles or whatever) in order for the interface to become 3D, any more than 3D games (Quake, etc.) need 3D displays.
There are a lot of practical issues with how to be able to see everything you've got working, easily zoom in to scrutinize or manipulate a particular object, then zoom back out to select something else. Expose is one fairly good way of doing it, but I see it as just a stopgap, prolonging the 2D interface longer but not really being the long-term solution. The usual 2D interface in Windows and traditional Macintosh isn't so great, though generally worlds better than command lines, and not bad as 2D interfaces go. (And don't forget, even as recently as 10 years ago there were hordes of people defending the command line, saying they didn't need icons, menus, windows, or a mouse...)
But in many ways a spatial (and hence 3D) interface may be the best solution in the long term. This Sphere 3D interface is conceptually about as good as I've seen, but so far it's obviously just a rough demo of the concept, rather than something really practical.
For this to be successful, it needs to be fully integrated into the system (full functionality from within the 3D interface, including background windows that continue to update and are open to manipulation), graphics need to be high quality (vector graphics wherever possible, plus good anti-aliasing and filtering), performance must be quick, smooth, and precise, and the interface for controlling the environment (rotating, zooming, etc.) must also be smooth, precise, easy to learn, standardized, and not interfere with other functionality of the system (pointing within windows, entering text, right-click menus, etc.)
Control interface standardization is possibly one of the most unpredictable and challenging aspects. I'm not sure anyone would have predicted 10 years ago that "wasd" would become the standard interface for nearly all first-person 3D computer games aside from flight simulators (w=move forward, a=sidestep left, d=sidestep right, and s=move backward, using the mouse to aim in a polar manner). But now that it has, most gamers with some experience can sit down to any new first-person game and instantly have excellent movement and aiming skills, whereas in the old days it took considerable time to master the control scheme of each individual game. (This arrangement has become so ingrained, it's also used for control in many non-first-person games as well.)
At any rate, I see the popular rejection of 3D interfaces by many pundits to be a combination of a failure of imagination with the unpolished state of most current examples.