Reactionary changes of ones behaviour to the world doesn't work well. It works with evolution because a lot of things die every generation. We don't want that with our world. If people start caring about science when global warming floods the cities, it is a bit late. The point is, the way society value science is wrong, and unless the "market" makes an adjustment soon, a recession will hit to make a finance analogy.
And what is with the personal insults. I wasn't a math geek and barely studied anything. If anything, I was a over-weight lazy bastard during high school apart from the occasional game of basketball and rugby.
I wouldn't mind others ranting that I am ignorant, I can only hope for such a day to come. The fact that I don't spend most of my time reading or learning, but still seem to know quite a bit more than the average person, quite frankly, scares me. I don't know any other way to put it.
Natural has many definitions, one of which is "normal and expected". Just because it is not general in the adult population, doesn't mean it is not natural. Last time I checked, most infants are extremely curious. Also, I was implying that there ought to be a natural urge to answer the "How" questions, not that there is already one. Your logic is a bit off.
And the Paris Hilton line was a joke (lame I admit in retrospect), lighten up....
The lack of emphasis on Science, Maths and good ol' Logic during schooling, especially in the earlier years, is to blame for the lack of public interest in real science. Many of my relatives and friends just don't care about how things work, as long as they do. That, the natural curiosity to find answers for the "how" questions, is what is lacking in society today in general. The only time people want to know it seems, is if they are in danger or if their wallets are involved.
The problem is, the majority of the "ruling class" in management, government and all other areas are generally not scientifically inclined nor are they actively promoting science. They influence education policy and funding for research, which trickles down to the education system and the public's view of science.
I personally found algebra and calculus to be interesting and challenging, the latter is what drove a lot of my friends away, when I first learned it ages ago. I know that if I had worst teachers or if my father weren't an engineer, my feelings towards would have been quite different. Until scientists are more popular than movie stars and mathematicians are more well known than recording artists, the root of the problem will still be that science is just not popular enough to be seen as interesting or useful.
The fact that people actually care about Paris Hilton is also a nice solid data point in my suggestion that people's perspective on what's interesting and important is just waaaay off the mark from reality.
Assuming there is a way to get to the Hydrocarbons, wouldn't burning it on Earth still be idiotic given the effect of the Greenhouse gases it would produce?
Remove all "amateur" content on youtube, say 99.99% of the Top Videos for Today, should help quite a bit.
As long as I can still get "amateur" pr0n, everything is fine. Worst case scenario, HD-DVDs or Blue-Ray pr0n. Ahhh, how human civilization have progressed. Good time, good times.
Chinese history books provide many accounts of revolutions, with perspectives from both sides. The Chinese government tends to censor current information, not information about the past. Much like the "Classified" category of information in the states. Older information that no longer has an imapact gets released to the public.
Chinese users are used to Internet censorship. A lot of educated users know about it and simply surf via overseas proxies. Google will most likely filter results based on Chinese government advisement. It *IS* a business and instead of not being present at all in China, they have decided to provide part of their services in a restricted way. Every country has their own laws, for their own reasons, China is no different. Would it be better if Google didn't enter the Chinese market and users have less choice in search engines? If anyone thinks the Chinese government will adjust their policies for foreign businesses, they don't know the Chinese government at all.
I grew up in Hong Kong and I have been to China several times. I have relatives in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the states. I don't claim to have a deep grasp of Chinese history or even its culture, but censorship is a touchy issue in Chinese politics. There are a lot of illiterate and uneducated people in China, especially in the country side. Censorship was first put in place as the government is worried about civilian revolutions and strikes due to misunderstanding of government policy. Not speaking the same dialect and not being able to write at all makes for some heated debates between people. This was and still is, to some extent, the reality of the situation in China. If you understand the way some terrorists misquote and misunderstand US policy and statements, its somewhat similar.
China is still very far behind the western nations in terms of education and technology. It is slowly improving its ability to educate everyone, but its no where near adequate yet. The fact that the Chinese ruling party is made up of so many politicians (1000+ from memory) means that changing long standing laws require a lot of time, as there are so many from the old guard still around. In short, just like China opening its trade borders and becoming more liberal, especially in the big cities like Shanghai, censorship will be gone in a decade or two. We just have to be patient, as the Chinese government does not like fast changes, and it has a lot of past incidents of revolutions that it does not want to repeat.
I think the main issue here is whether a US business should be allowed to operate in a way that would be illegal in the states. Personally, I don't see a problem with this. Different countries and cultures have different views on information freedom. Absolute freedom is not always a good thing, whilst government censorship is always biased and abusable. One can easily argue that leaving Neo-Nazi and bomb making information easily accessible on the web, especially to teenagers, is not the right thing to do, even in order to provide freedom of information.
In summary, good decision made by Google, over-blown censorship new stories by the media.
You do realize that those members left ages ago (a year I think) and we were the first guild to be vocal about Eminence for their raid lockout bug exploitation and ninja looting in joint raids. Plus, after the guild split between US and Aus players due to raid time issues, we are all Aussies and Singaporians pretty much.
FYI Blackrock is a PvP server, which means you should grief the opposing side. We never grief our own faction. And there is nothing wrong with having a few asshats in a guild to make light of any situation, like summoning people underwater, into rocks and onto lava. Ahhh good times. If only I had less work, I could start playing WoW again
I never read the forums (WoW I presume?) as it is full of trolls and flamewar threads. I think the only post I ever made was when the US players transfered and there was a guild leader change.
If only we can rob people of their gold, that would make the whole PvP system even more interesting. You do lost gold on repairs if you get killed, but most farmers have tons of gold and sellable items in their banks. Farming is more to do with staying in an area for a long time, and repeatedly killing the same group of monsters to get low percentage item drops, or just money from gold or items that sell well (but common).
Farming can become a problem, especially when a large group of farmers completely take over an area that has items the guild needed, for various objectives in the game. Thats usually when we get serious about wiping out farmers in an area and staying there for many minutes to send a message.
Most of the time, we just have groups of friends, say 5-15 people, roaming around killing random players in farming areas. Or doing stupid stuff like following a farmer around for a few minutes while we have a chat online or go grab food to eat. Farmers generally don't attack other people actively, to prevent backlash which would lead to lost farming time. So, they will go on running around, farming, with a chain of 15 players of the opposing faction behind them. Makes for some interesting screenshots and gives the noobs passing by something to stare at. All while everyone is AFK or just too lazy to play WoW.
Whoever you are, Chinese gold farmer, PvP addict, PvE carebear, if you join a good guild in WoW, you end up having a great time and not having to worry about group with "randoms". Just make some friends in the game, or find people you know that play on your server, and join or make a guild. Thats half the fun of WoW, seriously.
I used to play WoW religiously (clocked in 55 days of play) before I quit a few months ago. For around 3 to 4 weeks, I was a guild leader on the Blackrock realm for the Guild NoMaam on a character called "Ruins". The guild had around 100 or so people, all with max level (60) characters. We did all the high end content, including Molten Core, 40 man PvP, raiding enemy towns and the obligatory 40-man fishing squads that kill players with fishing poles in between catches. It was very entertaining, especially since we used voice chat software whenever we did things in a group. Nothing is funnier than secretly bribing a friend to wipe the entire 40-man raid out as a joke, and hearing the mixture of laughter and angry screams when a tiny gnome leads a train of 10-story tall giants towards the group.
Back on topic, I personally did not like people that only farmed gold, as it is only a small part of the game. Playing on a PvP server, which allows you to kill opposing faction players, the unspoken rule of repeatedly killing farmers is pretty much a given for most guilds. The only farming that gets done is when you are in a group, which led to the formation of farming guilds. I am not joking. I once killed a few farmers solo, and in 15 minutes, a group of 40 arrived, all from the same guild. Then, my guild arrived. Ah... good times. WoW: Gang Warfare.
I was born in Hong Kong and lived there until I was 10. I have friends in the guild that are Chinese international students, with heavy accents and poor English. I had real trouble understanding one of them when he spoke in English, typed or vocal. We always joked about their poor English, but as they are in the guild, everyone got along, especially since the higher level content demanded group work. Sometimes, we had a guy translate raid instructions to Chinese for a few of the players, which always had a lot more swearing in it for some reason. "If you get the "Living Bomb" curse, run the fuck away from your group" translates to something a Chinese sailor wouldn't say at a Bachelor Party lol.
Personally, if people play on a PvE server that is inherently based on conquering the environment, farming is inevitable. Whether the player sells what they farm on Ebay is up to them, and the punishment should be dealt by Blizzard. On a PvP server, I usually kill any opposing faction player I see unless I know them on IRC or IRL. Most PvP-oriented guilds like us had farmer-killing runs where we visit every popular farming spot and get some PvP points off farmers for our guild members. Farmers have a tough time in general, and if they want to suffer to earn money, its up to Blizzard to ban them.
The idea of using grammar and spelling levels as a filter has its good points, to allow for easier communication for giving raid instructions, loot disputes and friendly chat like "ROFL we have 3 healers not healing, a tank not tanking and me, the mage, dying in 2 seconds..." It will likely reject the following people:
1) Foreign players
2) Kids in general, of all ages (up to 30 years old at times...)
3) Most members of my Guild, including me
4) Anyone on a WoW binge, going for a full 24 hours or more
5) People that find it stupid and offensive to be tested and leave the party
2.4 Terabit Hard Drive, or in layman non-marketing speak, 300GB... I mean 279.4 Gigabytes.
I would like to patent a new measurement unit, called the bi (pronounced "bee"). Not to be confused with the slang used to describe a person with bisexual tendencies, this measurement unit quantifies memory size.
First order effects caused by: Alcohol
Second order effects caused by: Concussion from First Order parameters
Third order effects: Too small (aka annoying and hard) to evaluate experimentally
The fact that the system was started first with only passive cooling made us nervous. Therefore, we wanted to fill the thing up with oil without delay; otherwise, you run the risk of the processor or the graphics chip overheating, of course. By contrast, the variation of first filling the oil and then starting the computer is less dangerous.
Switching to Windows: Intended for the average computer user:
1) Get a blank Hard Disk or create a new partition. Use partition magic or get a friend to do it
2) Boot the windows CD and install
3) Install firewall software
4) Get updates from Microsoft or a friend
5) Install other programs
Its not that hard. I run a tri-boot system at home, with Windows-Work, Windows-Gaming and Linux. If I had to switch over from Windows to Linux, the main issues is not just the changes in interface, configuration style (init files etc), but finding replacement programs for things I am using under Windows. Like all my games, EndNote, Wakan/KanjiQuick(Japanese Writing), RatDVD and CDisplay for my manga viewing. Sure, there are similar tools available under Linux, but some features are missing, especially for rare programs like CDisplay. One can see that this reverse situation is arguably worst than going from Linux --> Windows. Sure, you may have to pay some money to get the software you need, but, at least they are available.
It all comes down to a popular OS always having more variety of software, paid or open source, being developed for it. Personally, I think most computer users will end up dual-booting Windows (Vista) and Linux as time goes by, unless emulation becomes easy enough (for the average PC user) and fast enough to be a viable option.
Now, let me go play som WoW, followed by a reboot to do some programming in Visual C then another reboot to start up my FTP server under Linux T_T
Open rectum, place iPod centered on the opening. Move hand towards opening until the iPod has completely entered the body.
I swear, the next time a student ask me a question in a Lab while listening to an iPod, and then re-asks the same question 30 seconds later, this will be my reply. Not that it will be heard through the "doof-doof" music he is listening to anyways.
Seriously though, my professors have iPods, my supervisor is getting one, and my sister has one. How about some articles on Apple monopolising "I-can-dance-to-mp3s-because-I-have-an-iPod" market.
Don't know if this has been mentioned, but PC games would really benefit from this. Imagine being able to see the facial extressions, heart rate and general mood of players in a FPS or even MMORPG. This can bring a whole new dimensions to team based warfare games, such as making sure you didn't piss off a fellow soldier because you called him a "nutmonkey". And, it would definitely help with getting sarcastic jokes across via chat, voice or otherwise. "Yes, I wanted to be summoned underwater so I can drown and spend 10 minutes running back to my corpse. Thank you."
Personally, I would like to try the following in an MMORPG:
[Night Elf Female]: Sup guys, this is l33tlamer's gf playing. He had to go get some food
[Human Female 1]: *user emotion: Aroused
[Human Female 2]: *user emotion: Aroused
[Human Female 3]: *user emotion: Aroused ...
[Night Elf Female]: *user emotion: Sad
[Human Female 1]: Why are you sad? Did we offend you?
[Night Elf Female]: Damn unreliable emotion detection. Just because I had tears doesn't mean I am sad
[Night Elf Female 1]: *user emotion: Uncontrollable Laughter
[Night Elf Female 1]: OMGGURLONWEB11!!!! lol you morons
Slashdot Mirror
Reactionary changes of ones behaviour to the world doesn't work well. It works with evolution because a lot of things die every generation. We don't want that with our world. If people start caring about science when global warming floods the cities, it is a bit late. The point is, the way society value science is wrong, and unless the "market" makes an adjustment soon, a recession will hit to make a finance analogy.
And what is with the personal insults. I wasn't a math geek and barely studied anything. If anything, I was a over-weight lazy bastard during high school apart from the occasional game of basketball and rugby.
I wouldn't mind others ranting that I am ignorant, I can only hope for such a day to come. The fact that I don't spend most of my time reading or learning, but still seem to know quite a bit more than the average person, quite frankly, scares me. I don't know any other way to put it.
Natural has many definitions, one of which is "normal and expected". Just because it is not general in the adult population, doesn't mean it is not natural. Last time I checked, most infants are extremely curious. Also, I was implying that there ought to be a natural urge to answer the "How" questions, not that there is already one. Your logic is a bit off.
And the Paris Hilton line was a joke (lame I admit in retrospect), lighten up....
Yes if you got fragged by me.
No if you are me.
The lack of emphasis on Science, Maths and good ol' Logic during schooling, especially in the earlier years, is to blame for the lack of public interest in real science. Many of my relatives and friends just don't care about how things work, as long as they do. That, the natural curiosity to find answers for the "how" questions, is what is lacking in society today in general. The only time people want to know it seems, is if they are in danger or if their wallets are involved.
The problem is, the majority of the "ruling class" in management, government and all other areas are generally not scientifically inclined nor are they actively promoting science. They influence education policy and funding for research, which trickles down to the education system and the public's view of science.
I personally found algebra and calculus to be interesting and challenging, the latter is what drove a lot of my friends away, when I first learned it ages ago. I know that if I had worst teachers or if my father weren't an engineer, my feelings towards would have been quite different. Until scientists are more popular than movie stars and mathematicians are more well known than recording artists, the root of the problem will still be that science is just not popular enough to be seen as interesting or useful.
The fact that people actually care about Paris Hilton is also a nice solid data point in my suggestion that people's perspective on what's interesting and important is just waaaay off the mark from reality.
Assuming there is a way to get to the Hydrocarbons, wouldn't burning it on Earth still be idiotic given the effect of the Greenhouse gases it would produce?
The study found that 30% of children between the ages of 9 and 18 delete the search history from their browsers because of pr0n
Considering the quality of "songs" being "sung" by pop "artists", not sure if this would work.
The number of times I wanted to run someone off the road and jack their cars after a long gaming binge on GTA....
ah-sam-bow-lee? Is that for programming robots that assemble ikea tables?
Remove all "amateur" content on youtube, say 99.99% of the Top Videos for Today, should help quite a bit. As long as I can still get "amateur" pr0n, everything is fine. Worst case scenario, HD-DVDs or Blue-Ray pr0n. Ahhh, how human civilization have progressed. Good time, good times.
Chinese history books provide many accounts of revolutions, with perspectives from both sides. The Chinese government tends to censor current information, not information about the past. Much like the "Classified" category of information in the states. Older information that no longer has an imapact gets released to the public.
Chinese users are used to Internet censorship. A lot of educated users know about it and simply surf via overseas proxies. Google will most likely filter results based on Chinese government advisement. It *IS* a business and instead of not being present at all in China, they have decided to provide part of their services in a restricted way. Every country has their own laws, for their own reasons, China is no different. Would it be better if Google didn't enter the Chinese market and users have less choice in search engines? If anyone thinks the Chinese government will adjust their policies for foreign businesses, they don't know the Chinese government at all.
I grew up in Hong Kong and I have been to China several times. I have relatives in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the states. I don't claim to have a deep grasp of Chinese history or even its culture, but censorship is a touchy issue in Chinese politics. There are a lot of illiterate and uneducated people in China, especially in the country side. Censorship was first put in place as the government is worried about civilian revolutions and strikes due to misunderstanding of government policy. Not speaking the same dialect and not being able to write at all makes for some heated debates between people. This was and still is, to some extent, the reality of the situation in China. If you understand the way some terrorists misquote and misunderstand US policy and statements, its somewhat similar.
China is still very far behind the western nations in terms of education and technology. It is slowly improving its ability to educate everyone, but its no where near adequate yet. The fact that the Chinese ruling party is made up of so many politicians (1000+ from memory) means that changing long standing laws require a lot of time, as there are so many from the old guard still around. In short, just like China opening its trade borders and becoming more liberal, especially in the big cities like Shanghai, censorship will be gone in a decade or two. We just have to be patient, as the Chinese government does not like fast changes, and it has a lot of past incidents of revolutions that it does not want to repeat.
I think the main issue here is whether a US business should be allowed to operate in a way that would be illegal in the states. Personally, I don't see a problem with this. Different countries and cultures have different views on information freedom. Absolute freedom is not always a good thing, whilst government censorship is always biased and abusable. One can easily argue that leaving Neo-Nazi and bomb making information easily accessible on the web, especially to teenagers, is not the right thing to do, even in order to provide freedom of information.
In summary, good decision made by Google, over-blown censorship new stories by the media.
Our writting skill r eccelant
the next leap year is not due until 2008
o_O
You do realize that those members left ages ago (a year I think) and we were the first guild to be vocal about Eminence for their raid lockout bug exploitation and ninja looting in joint raids. Plus, after the guild split between US and Aus players due to raid time issues, we are all Aussies and Singaporians pretty much.
FYI Blackrock is a PvP server, which means you should grief the opposing side. We never grief our own faction. And there is nothing wrong with having a few asshats in a guild to make light of any situation, like summoning people underwater, into rocks and onto lava. Ahhh good times. If only I had less work, I could start playing WoW again
I never read the forums (WoW I presume?) as it is full of trolls and flamewar threads. I think the only post I ever made was when the US players transfered and there was a guild leader change.
If only we can rob people of their gold, that would make the whole PvP system even more interesting. You do lost gold on repairs if you get killed, but most farmers have tons of gold and sellable items in their banks. Farming is more to do with staying in an area for a long time, and repeatedly killing the same group of monsters to get low percentage item drops, or just money from gold or items that sell well (but common). Farming can become a problem, especially when a large group of farmers completely take over an area that has items the guild needed, for various objectives in the game. Thats usually when we get serious about wiping out farmers in an area and staying there for many minutes to send a message. Most of the time, we just have groups of friends, say 5-15 people, roaming around killing random players in farming areas. Or doing stupid stuff like following a farmer around for a few minutes while we have a chat online or go grab food to eat. Farmers generally don't attack other people actively, to prevent backlash which would lead to lost farming time. So, they will go on running around, farming, with a chain of 15 players of the opposing faction behind them. Makes for some interesting screenshots and gives the noobs passing by something to stare at. All while everyone is AFK or just too lazy to play WoW.
Whats the fun in doing Molten Core every week if there aint a wipe or two. Btw, the "bribe" was a promise to set up a PvP session after Molten Core
Whoever you are, Chinese gold farmer, PvP addict, PvE carebear, if you join a good guild in WoW, you end up having a great time and not having to worry about group with "randoms". Just make some friends in the game, or find people you know that play on your server, and join or make a guild. Thats half the fun of WoW, seriously.
I used to play WoW religiously (clocked in 55 days of play) before I quit a few months ago. For around 3 to 4 weeks, I was a guild leader on the Blackrock realm for the Guild NoMaam on a character called "Ruins". The guild had around 100 or so people, all with max level (60) characters. We did all the high end content, including Molten Core, 40 man PvP, raiding enemy towns and the obligatory 40-man fishing squads that kill players with fishing poles in between catches. It was very entertaining, especially since we used voice chat software whenever we did things in a group. Nothing is funnier than secretly bribing a friend to wipe the entire 40-man raid out as a joke, and hearing the mixture of laughter and angry screams when a tiny gnome leads a train of 10-story tall giants towards the group.
Back on topic, I personally did not like people that only farmed gold, as it is only a small part of the game. Playing on a PvP server, which allows you to kill opposing faction players, the unspoken rule of repeatedly killing farmers is pretty much a given for most guilds. The only farming that gets done is when you are in a group, which led to the formation of farming guilds. I am not joking. I once killed a few farmers solo, and in 15 minutes, a group of 40 arrived, all from the same guild. Then, my guild arrived. Ah... good times. WoW: Gang Warfare.
I was born in Hong Kong and lived there until I was 10. I have friends in the guild that are Chinese international students, with heavy accents and poor English. I had real trouble understanding one of them when he spoke in English, typed or vocal. We always joked about their poor English, but as they are in the guild, everyone got along, especially since the higher level content demanded group work. Sometimes, we had a guy translate raid instructions to Chinese for a few of the players, which always had a lot more swearing in it for some reason. "If you get the "Living Bomb" curse, run the fuck away from your group" translates to something a Chinese sailor wouldn't say at a Bachelor Party lol.
Personally, if people play on a PvE server that is inherently based on conquering the environment, farming is inevitable. Whether the player sells what they farm on Ebay is up to them, and the punishment should be dealt by Blizzard. On a PvP server, I usually kill any opposing faction player I see unless I know them on IRC or IRL. Most PvP-oriented guilds like us had farmer-killing runs where we visit every popular farming spot and get some PvP points off farmers for our guild members. Farmers have a tough time in general, and if they want to suffer to earn money, its up to Blizzard to ban them.
The idea of using grammar and spelling levels as a filter has its good points, to allow for easier communication for giving raid instructions, loot disputes and friendly chat like "ROFL we have 3 healers not healing, a tank not tanking and me, the mage, dying in 2 seconds..." It will likely reject the following people:
1) Foreign players
2) Kids in general, of all ages (up to 30 years old at times...)
3) Most members of my Guild, including me
4) Anyone on a WoW binge, going for a full 24 hours or more
5) People that find it stupid and offensive to be tested and leave the party
2.4 Terabit Hard Drive, or in layman non-marketing speak, 300GB... I mean 279.4 Gigabytes.
I would like to patent a new measurement unit, called the bi (pronounced "bee"). Not to be confused with the slang used to describe a person with bisexual tendencies, this measurement unit quantifies memory size.
1 bi = 0.001 bit
Fear my 2400,000,000,000,000 bi hard drive!!!111
First order effects caused by: Alcohol Second order effects caused by: Concussion from First Order parameters Third order effects: Too small (aka annoying and hard) to evaluate experimentally
The fact that the system was started first with only passive cooling made us nervous. Therefore, we wanted to fill the thing up with oil without delay; otherwise, you run the risk of the processor or the graphics chip overheating, of course. By contrast, the variation of first filling the oil and then starting the computer is less dangerous.
Ok . . .
Google Digitally Rooted Me
Switching to Windows: Intended for the average computer user:
1) Get a blank Hard Disk or create a new partition. Use partition magic or get a friend to do it
2) Boot the windows CD and install
3) Install firewall software
4) Get updates from Microsoft or a friend
5) Install other programs
Its not that hard. I run a tri-boot system at home, with Windows-Work, Windows-Gaming and Linux. If I had to switch over from Windows to Linux, the main issues is not just the changes in interface, configuration style (init files etc), but finding replacement programs for things I am using under Windows. Like all my games, EndNote, Wakan/KanjiQuick(Japanese Writing), RatDVD and CDisplay for my manga viewing. Sure, there are similar tools available under Linux, but some features are missing, especially for rare programs like CDisplay. One can see that this reverse situation is arguably worst than going from Linux --> Windows. Sure, you may have to pay some money to get the software you need, but, at least they are available.
It all comes down to a popular OS always having more variety of software, paid or open source, being developed for it. Personally, I think most computer users will end up dual-booting Windows (Vista) and Linux as time goes by, unless emulation becomes easy enough (for the average PC user) and fast enough to be a viable option.
Now, let me go play som WoW, followed by a reboot to do some programming in Visual C then another reboot to start up my FTP server under Linux T_T
Anime nerd, Manga geeks, Hentai freaks, Loli Maniacs, Warez Distributors and Attention-grabbing Cam whores... I mean MySpace users rejoice :)
Open rectum, place iPod centered on the opening. Move hand towards opening until the iPod has completely entered the body.
I swear, the next time a student ask me a question in a Lab while listening to an iPod, and then re-asks the same question 30 seconds later, this will be my reply. Not that it will be heard through the "doof-doof" music he is listening to anyways.
Seriously though, my professors have iPods, my supervisor is getting one, and my sister has one. How about some articles on Apple monopolising "I-can-dance-to-mp3s-because-I-have-an-iPod" market.
Don't know if this has been mentioned, but PC games would really benefit from this. Imagine being able to see the facial extressions, heart rate and general mood of players in a FPS or even MMORPG. This can bring a whole new dimensions to team based warfare games, such as making sure you didn't piss off a fellow soldier because you called him a "nutmonkey". And, it would definitely help with getting sarcastic jokes across via chat, voice or otherwise. "Yes, I wanted to be summoned underwater so I can drown and spend 10 minutes running back to my corpse. Thank you."
...
Personally, I would like to try the following in an MMORPG:
[Night Elf Female]: Sup guys, this is l33tlamer's gf playing. He had to go get some food
[Human Female 1]: *user emotion: Aroused
[Human Female 2]: *user emotion: Aroused
[Human Female 3]: *user emotion: Aroused
[Night Elf Female]: *user emotion: Sad
[Human Female 1]: Why are you sad? Did we offend you?
[Night Elf Female]: Damn unreliable emotion detection. Just because I had tears doesn't mean I am sad
[Night Elf Female 1]: *user emotion: Uncontrollable Laughter
[Night Elf Female 1]: OMGGURLONWEB11!!!! lol you morons