I believe what GP is trying to say is that even if "next generation broadband" services (i.e. FiOS and DOCSIS 3.0) become common in large cities in the United States, the odds of that service becoming ubiquitous throughout the United States are not good, based on the pattern that DSL and cable Internet availability has followed in the past. As an example, he cited his own home region, which despite being near a large city, still is not completely served by any form of broadband and has poor quality broadband service in those areas where it is available.
If that is, in fact, GP's point, then he/she has a good argument. Despite all the miles of dark fiber that have been laid and all the investment in gee-whiz networking technology, we still have tolerably poor consumer broadband access in vast regions of this country. It's practically a Slashdot meme at this point that you can get a faster, cheaper Internet connection in Hanoi than in Honolulu. One would think, as we're ten years or so into the consumer broadband era, that the only people who should be left using "legacy speed" (less than 128 Kbit/sec) services are those who have chosen not to upgrade. However, there are still hundreds of thousands of people in rural and exurban areas who would love to have broadband service but can't get it at all due to expense or lack of availability, and hundreds of thousands more beyond that who have poor quality service but can't get anything better.
Going back to the original topic, those people like the GP with no broadband or poor broadband are the same people who'll be completely shut out of any kind of digital video distribution model, all of which are absolutely dependent on a good, high-speed data connection to function. I can't think of anyone who would willingly wait a week for a 20 GiB HD movie to download when they could drive up to the local movie rental store and take a BD or HD-DVD home within the hour. Those people are the reason why physical media will take a long, long time to die out completely, and until that happens, we'll continue to repeat the format wars over and over again.
If the point was shaming Nintendo into public disclosure of their environmental impacts, then the Greenpeace people would have done better to say so outright, rather than spin the "study" (I hesitate to call it that, as no real study was involved) as a blanket indictment of Nintendo's - or any other company's - environmental practices. To wit, instead of saying "Nintendo must be doing absolutely awful things to the environment because they didn't disclose their policies," they should have said "Nintendo didn't disclose its environmental policies, and we want to know why, since every other console manufacturer does." Regardless of their intent, their methods were dishonest, and that's what I take issue with. I agree that all companies and government agencies should disclose their environmental impacts, and if they have to be shamed into doing so, fine, but I do not think it's smart in either the short- or the long-term to use dishonest means to accomplish that end.
Instead of damaging or enhancing the reputations of the companies named in the report, the Greenpeace people have really damaged their own credibility and that of environmentalism at large. After all, if they have previously stated that their agenda includes disinformation and public attacks on popular companies to gain attention for their cause, how are people to know when they're telling the truth about other companies and when they're simply looking for easy PR? There's an element of crying wolf in their actions, and I think it's a disservice to all environmental movements when one or two act out in this manner.
So, if the information wasn't available on their Web site, did it ever occur to the Greenpeace researchers to send them an email or pick up a phone? Or ask a third party for independent confirmation of all three companies' environmental policies? I don't know ANYBODY in research or journalism that would consider a single source to be the end of their line of inquiry, and especially not when the single source is the digital equivalent of a corporate press release. As so many people have said before, lack of evidence does not mean automatic proof of guilt. Nintendo probably should have made that information more easily available, but that doesn't absolve Greenpeace from their responsibility to make certain of their facts before publishing something that purports to be based in fact.
When I wrote for my high school's newspaper, writing an article without clear, verifiable research from multiple sources was called "journalistic dishonesty." A first violation carried a one-semester suspension from staff; a second got you permanently dismissed and also sent you to the academic integrity board, which could throw you out of school entirely. Practically all of academia holds similarly strict policies. Would that Greenpeace researchers (or any researchers, really) were held to anything remotely resembling the same standard.
Yes, on three occasions - one between Me and 2K Professional, two between Vista and XP.
1) One of my uncles suffered through two years of Windows Me on his home laptop, patiently slogging through dozens of corrupted drivers, software incompatibilities and nonexistent networking support. The day the machine suffered a complete registry corruption was the day he decided to get rid of the albatross OS, and you've never seen a happier guy in your life than when that system booted to Windows 2000 for the first time.
2) A friend of my mother's upgraded the family desktop to Vista so her son could play Halo 2. Within three weeks, the entire family was begging to have Vista removed - father because none of his work programs would run under Vista, mother because her customer files from her Arbonne business didn't migrate properly, and son because all his games ran dog-slow and looked like garbage. I reinstalled XP for them, and there was much rejoicing.
3) The same uncle that ran afoul of Windows Me just purchased a top-end Dell XPS that came with Vista Home Premium and Office 2007 loaded, and according to him both programs are slower, buggier and generally more annoying than his old Me/97 install ever could have dreamed of being. Instead of bringing a fruit basket or a bottle of liquor to the family Christmas this year, he asked me for a drive wipe and XP install.
I believe that's already been done with the PC versions of Halo 2 and Shadowrun. I'm sure the rest of the Games For Windows catalogue, or at least the popular titles (Crysis, Mass Effect, et al) will follow in short order.
All the same, I think that enterprise users would probably riot if they were shoved into using Vista before Microsoft gets the bugs out. Home users historically haven't cared enough to complain, but people for whom a stable, secure, fast computer system means the difference between business and bankruptcy will drop Microsoft products like so many hot potatoes if they can't be assured that those products will meet their needs. Certainly they've done it before to other companies - witness the falls of WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase from business use. All three used to be business standards just as MS Office is the current standard, but all were discarded over extremely short intervals (usually one to three years) due to onerous licensing, platform lock-in, lack of requested features or support, or any combination thereof. Microsoft is kidding itself if it thinks MS Office is immune.
In my own experience, one does better with toys that can be upgraded to meet the child's increasing age and intelligence level than those that cater to one age level only. That eye-scope is clever, but it'll only be "good" for a very specific age range: those that are old enough to know about microscopic objects and organisms, but young enough not to find the massive eyeball design "kiddie." You'd be much better off with a standard microscope. I've also had good luck with building toys (erector sets, Legos and the like), as those can be expanded to grow with the child and can be passed down to other children. Finally, when all else fails, outdoor toys are always a good bet; I have yet to meet a boy or girl of any age who doesn't like "finding" things outside (flowers, rocks, sticks, animal tracks and whatnot). It's a great way to teach them about the life and earth sciences, and anything that gets kids, geeky or not, away from the TV is a good thing.
As to those that cried foul for product placement, this is a highly useful thread for people like me who refuse to buy the yearly crop of B.S. toys being flogged by Toys R Us and the like. Ever since I've had nieces and nephews, I have always tried to buy them toys that have educational value, and then attempt to teach them the science or logic behind the toy. However, I've found educational toys to be exceptionally hit-or-miss affairs, though, and more often than not they land me in Aunt Hell - the state in which your niece or nephew takes one look at the gift, says "Thanks, Aunt Lindsay" and runs away to play Maim-A-Thon XII for the PSWii60 that Grandma sent from Florida, convinced that you're the lamest grown-up ever to walk the earth. If someone else out there can tell me what toys have gone over well or not with their kids, I'd like to know so I can avoid a waste of money and/or good will.
Funny, that. We have a 32" HD CRT (1080i max), and while HD does provide a much clearer picture, the loss of screen real-estate from letterboxing actually makes it worse for sports and other programs with lots of action, which is where HD is supposed to shine. It's glaringly noticeable, for example, between ESPN and ESPN HD - on one channel the players are life-size, on the other they look like Lego men. Last weekend, when I turned on the Michigan/Michigan State game in HD, everyone yelled at me to turn it back. From the couch, which is about fifteen feet from the TV, they couldn't tell what was a Spartan and what was grass!
To add insult to injury, we're stuck with the same size and type of TV till we move - the entertainment hutch is permanently built into the wall, and it will only accommodate a 34" or smaller TV cabinet. Sigh.
That's true for fresh frozen plasma, but the only patients that are getting FFP now are people with clotting disorders and rarely, patients with other blood dyscrasias. Ringer's lactate and D5W have been the fluids of choice for volume replacement for at least the last ten years. Moreover, FFP and acellular blood concentrates still contain clotting factors and complement proteins, which could conceivably be affected adversely by this process.
Again, not in this area. We have one department in the next county over that's notorious for handing out Basic Speed Law tickets on visual evidence alone. As in, it's a clear sunny summer day with minimal traffic on the road, the radar gun says you were doing 65 in a 70 zone, but the cop tickets you anyway because he claims you were going "too fast for road conditions." This particular department has admitted - in the newspaper, no less - that it's a noise abatement and revenue generation measure rather than any real effort toward traffic safety, and the nonstop ticketing (they frequently put six patrol cars on one particular stretch of freeway during rush hour and just ticket people in job lots) actually increases accidents because everyone panics, swerves and generally drives in an unsafe manner whenever they see the patrol cars. Despite all that, the judges all uphold the tickets anyway.
+1 to parent. I have an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook for my laptop, and getting that thing to run nicely alongside the onboard sound module is a gold plated, diamond encrusted pain in the anatomy. In the past I've had to install all kinds of proprietary drivers and blacklist the AC'97 modules to get the Audigy to work at all, and that's a less than optimal solution for lots of reasons - closed source, kills onboard speakers, ALSA required, and so on. Worse, neither Feisty nor Gutsy will suspend properly when the Audigy card is plugged in. I'm not sure how much of that can be fixed in kernel space, but it might be worthwhile for them to try.
Not where I live. Around here, all the cop has to do is show up to win a ticket - ANY ticket, be it for speeding, running a stop sign/light, illegal turn or whatever. Furthermore, regardless of what time the cop is supposed to be in court, the judge/magistrate will usually make you wait till he/she gets there, thereby depriving you of a possible default dismissal.
I've also been convicted on obviously inadequate or downright forged evidence, as when a cop pulled me over for running a red light and illegal left turn. (I started my left when the light was still yellow, but the cop claimed it turned red before I got through the intersection.) When I challenged the ticket, he produced a DVD-RW from his car's camera that purported to show me running the light, except he had to do the playback on a Windows machine, not a standalone DVD player. The video file he opened was dated "last edited" the day before the court date, not the day I got the ticket, and the video didn't start till I was already pulled over. When I pointed those discrepancies out to the judge, he said "Well, Officer Smith said you ran the light, and I see no reason to doubt him" and handed me a $250 fine.
Funny, that. My mother refused to have me kid-printed when the friendly local law enforcement officer came to our school, but it wasn't because she felt that I should be able to run away - far from it. She didn't want my fingerprints, or any other identifying information, where the cops could get their hands on it. (Our local constabulary wasn't exactly known for its stringent adherence to due process, particularly where kids were concerned.)
That said, my parents always knew where I was, or at least who I was with. I had a few out-of-bounds areas (must be within two miles of home or school if unaccompanied, no riding bikes on major roads unless the road has a sidewalk), and I had to let them know if I was going to stay late at school or go to a friend's house, but other than that, they trusted that I was smart enough to stay away from trouble. (Either that, or they recognized that I was less likely to cause trouble if I was outside burning up energy than cooped in the house with nothing to do.)
Marines and Navy corpsmen already carry packets of a material called QuickClot - it's a rapid coagulant that will seal just about any bleeding injury within a few seconds. There have been cases where guys were shot through the neck, treated themselves (!) with this stuff and lived. Between that and the self-sealing, self-applicable dressing for sucking chest wounds, your average G.I. Joe or Jane can survive just about any wound to the point of first care. The problem is definitive treatment - putting the injured soldier back together to the point where he or she can serve again, or failing that, function adequately in the civilian world. As a result of saving so many of these guys that would have died on the field thirty or forty years ago, we're now seeing a whole new crop of battlefield injuries that weren't known before because people didn't survive to develop them before. Traumatic brain injury and peripheral nerve damage is a biggie, as are multiple amputations, short bowel syndrome from abdominal wounds, and chronic cardiopulmonary deficits from chest wounds.
We're pretty good at trauma care nowadays. What we're still learning is rehabilitation care.
That's something of an occupational hazard when playing Metroid Prime 3. I'm fairly sure that Samus could claim worker's compensation for job-related repetitive strain injuries by now - after all, she's spent most of her adult life running around with her right arm stuck straight out in front of her.:P
I do agree about the nunchuck controls being rather fiddly. It gets particularly annoying when whatever you're trying to do has a time limit - in fact, I ran afoul of it last night. When trying to kill certain bosses, notably one that bears a massive resemblance to a human cerebrum, you have a very short interval to yank the boss' armor off when it's stunned. Frequently you'll grapple onto the thing, whip your left arm around like a madwoman for five seconds to absolutely no avail, and then it shakes you off and you're back to square one. I'm not sure if it's due to a poor software interface or just the limitations of the nunchuck's accelerometer.
That said, the rest of the control scheme is very, very good once you get used to it. It's not perfect, but it's orders of magnitude better than the old twin analog scheme they used in MP1 and 2.
Hell, we're jealous of the platforms and powertrains the European models get! There's an amazing amount of innovation that goes on in the Big Three and its supply satellites. However, the vast majority of what they invent can't or won't be sold here because either: A) some dumb cluck Congressman decreed that every American-built car must include $GIZMO that would completely invalidate, destroy, etc. said innovation; or B) some dumb cluck marketer decided that "Americans will never buy" said innovation, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Every year, if you read the News and the Free Press coverage of the Detroit auto show, they're absolutely drooling over the scores of shiny, slick new models, and then it turns out that it's all destined for the European and Asian markets. Meanwhile, we just get the same lame sedan, minivan and SUV retreads with the same lame 3.0L V6 and 4.7L V8 that we've gotten every new model-year since 1997. Is it any wonder that everyone else's imports are eating our lunch?
Several countries have already tried that with this generation. I guess being paid less than minimum wage to go off to foreign lands, get shot/blown up/psychologically destroyed, and then be discarded once you return doesn't appeal to people so much anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for our armed forces, but they've done a fabulous job of making themselves irrelevant in the modern era, largely because military service has gone from stepping stone to dead end. It used to be that you could join the $BRANCH_OF_SERVICE, spend a few years serving and come out with some useful job skills and/or access to higher education. Now, all you can do after getting out is go back to the same minimum wage job you left - assuming it hasn't been outsourced to China.
I suspect the problem with Gen Y and future generations isn't laziness so much as apathy. I also suspect that the same problem is behind the cultural changes in Japan and other similarly structured nations. It used to be that there was a reciprocal arrangement between you and your employer: loyalty for loyalty. You gave your hard work to the company, and in return the company took care of you. Now that the companies don't give two hoots for their employees, employees don't care about the company. (We in the Detroit area are seeing that on a massive scale with the fall of the Midsized Three.) If nothing you do is worth anything, everyone's expendable, there is no security and there is no way out, why bother?
QuarkXPress used to do the same thing, except the hardware key went between the keyboard and the machine, which frequently broke the machine when it failed to recognize that it still had a keyboard attached to it. I went through that particular flavor of hell in high school when we upgraded to Quark 4, and installing fifty of those little buggers was fun times, let me tell you. "Dongle" became a rather popular swear word in the weeks following the upgrade.
I agree with the parent poster about not having too many issues regarding the activation of Windows XP. I rarely ran afoul of such problems in my former life as a techie for hire, and I haven't had it happen yet to any of the machines I personally support. However, I must disagree about the amount of trialware and associated crap that comes loaded on a standard machine for purchase. Quite honestly, it's staggering.
The most recent time I had to re-image my mom's laptop (an Inspiron E1705) from the Dell recovery disk, I spent about an hour in the actual re-imaging process and three and a half hours after that cleaning out all the trialware. IIRC, the total "software I don't want" loadout came to three ISP "free trials," AIM, a massive package of games, Microsoft Works and associated crud (this on a machine that was supposed to come with MS Office preloaded), free trials of Quicken, Norton Antivirus, Rhapsody, MusicMatch, Paint Shop Pro and some photo management program, and a massive pile of completely useless Dell "support" software. All but three of those (the games, the photo manager and one of the ISP trials) required a restart after removal. Digging all the trial garbage out of the system also left the registry in horribly messy condition, which required an additional thirty minutes or so to clean up. This, of course, doesn't count the multiple restarts required by Windows Update.
In the game of installing crap I don't want, though, I think the only company that beats Dell is Hewlett Packard. Why, why, WHY do they not simply offer a straight driver for their equipment? My printer is a bare-bones inkjet. All I want it to do is print text. I do not want to manage my photos, nor do I want to print photos from it. I do not want "HP Creativity Solutions." I do not want the printer to nag me about buying Genuine HP Ink Cartridges, nor do I want it to phone home every day and nag me about New And Exciting Products From HP. And for the life of me, I do not want to install 47 Mb of garbage for a driver that should be 50 Kb at most.
Given all that rigamarole, I can understand why people might think a pirated version of any given program beats the recovery disk. It's not a decision I would make for myself - to paraphrase the classic parental line, I don't know where that program has been - but I understand where they're coming from.
(Full disclosure: The author's machine runs Ubuntu. Other members of her family use systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X.)
I'll start being worried when the sexaroids' spines start glowing bright red during the act.
Then again, given the opportunity to nail Tricia Helfer, Lucy Lawless AND Grace Park, I suspect most men would consider a little global nuclear holocaust to be a fair tradeoff...
My dad has the same problem, which I've mentioned before. Nothing we've done has managed to get him off the list for any length of time - we write letters, make PO'd phone calls, the DHS people swear he's clear to fly and then he goes to the airport and gets told he's on the no-fly list all over again. So, we just don't fly anymore. He no longer goes places to teach, and he and Mom drive everywhere they might want to go on vacation. They're debating whether they can even go to the family Christmas this year, which is being held at my uncle's in California, because neither of them can realistically spare a week to drive across the country, spend a day with family and drive back.
Prior to the no-fly insanity, my parents flew an average of 50,000 miles per year for both business and recreation. Almost all of it was paid travel (i.e. not frequent flyer rewards), too. I wonder what that loss, repeated among thousands of no-fly condemned travelers, represents to Northwest or United or whoever your hometown airline might be.
Please put down the flamethrower, sir. You're apt to hurt yourself with that thing.
The IRS reimbursement rate as of November 2006 is 48.5 cents/mile, which is what I used to calculate the cost per trip. Of that, gas is $12.80. (Her car, which is a midsize sedan for your information, averages 25 MPG according to its trip computer. That equates to 4 gallons at $3.20/gallon.) The rest goes toward lease payments, insurance, maintenance et al. Had I only compared the costs based on the price of gas, Amtrak would look like an even worse deal - it's over twice as expensive per round trip.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, I researched various ways to get from my residence in Boston to my family's home in metro Detroit in case of another air travel moratorium. The distance is 622 miles direct, or about 650 overland.
Flying: 1h45m in the air, 3 hours door-to-door (fifteen minutes on the T from my dorm to Logan, and we live about 30 minutes from Detroit Metro). A ticket then was about $300 in coach. Driving: Approximately 14-16 hours, depending on whether you go up across Ontario or down through Pennsylvania. Assuming you're old enough to rent a car (which I wasn't - minimum age in Massachusetts is 25), a compact rental one-way was about $250, plus $50 for two tanks of gas. Rail: 20-28 hours, minimum of three train changes and a bus transfer. Assuming I could cross the border and get on VIA Rail (Boston-Buffalo-Toronto, Toronto-Windsor, bus across to Detroit, Detroit-Birmingham), total travel time was 20 hours. Staying in the States, the route ran Boston-Albany, Albany-Toledo, bus to Detroit, Detroit-Birmingham and timed out at 28 hours. Cheapest ticket was $400.
Fast forward to the present. My mom works in Ann Arbor, and we're looking for ways to cut down on her commute. The drive is 50 miles one-way and takes about 45 minutes (there's rarely any traffic at the hours she drives). She must be at work no later than 0630, as the operating rooms open at 0700. We figured out that each day's round trip costs $48.50 at the current mileage rate. Amtrak only costs $28 round-trip, but the trip takes 1h30 one-way and the first morning train doesn't leave till 0653. The train doesn't even really work for students, as there are only three trains going through Ann Arbor on any given day and the train station is about as far distant from campus as you can get.
And Amtrak wonders why they're irrelevant everywhere but the Northeast Corridor...
The soulless marketing demon that came up with this dreck should be drawn, quartered and stabbed through the ears. Because that's about what listening to it feels like. Especially if you happen to be cooped up in a car full of children at the time.
Interesting, because among my parents it's the exact opposite. Dad cannot stand ANYTHING animated - not comedy, not action, not drama, doesn't matter if it's hand-drawn, CGI, Claymation or whatever. He refuses to watch any of my anime collection, walked out of Finding Nemo, and hid in the basement the entire time his grandchildren came to visit because they insisted that he watch Thomas the Tank Engine with them. He absolutely adores counterterrorism shoot-em-up stuff like The Unit and 24, but when I tried to get him to watch Stand Alone Complex, he couldn't get away from the TV fast enough. Cowboy Bebop didn't even make it past the opening credits.
Gaming doesn't make any sense to him, either. When we got a Wii this Christmas, he fooled with Wii Sports for about three minutes to be polite and then promptly ran downstairs. I went after him to see what the problem was, and found him watching some lame HBO romantic comedy (!). When I asked him what in the name of all that is good and holy he was watching, he replied, "It's better than that cartoon s***." I tried to get him to play Call Of Duty 3, thinking that maybe a WWII sim might be more his speed, but he only got thirty seconds, maybe a minute into the game before developing motion sickness. To this day, he believes that everyone who watches "cartoons" or plays games past the age of 5 or so must be smoking dope. This includes his own wife and children (see below).
Meanwhile, Mom is a South Park and Family Guy devotee, thoroughly enjoyed Noir and Cowboy Bebop, and regularly kicks my butt in the vast majority of video games (about the only type of game I can beat her at is first-person shooters). Go figure.
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I believe what GP is trying to say is that even if "next generation broadband" services (i.e. FiOS and DOCSIS 3.0) become common in large cities in the United States, the odds of that service becoming ubiquitous throughout the United States are not good, based on the pattern that DSL and cable Internet availability has followed in the past. As an example, he cited his own home region, which despite being near a large city, still is not completely served by any form of broadband and has poor quality broadband service in those areas where it is available.
If that is, in fact, GP's point, then he/she has a good argument. Despite all the miles of dark fiber that have been laid and all the investment in gee-whiz networking technology, we still have tolerably poor consumer broadband access in vast regions of this country. It's practically a Slashdot meme at this point that you can get a faster, cheaper Internet connection in Hanoi than in Honolulu. One would think, as we're ten years or so into the consumer broadband era, that the only people who should be left using "legacy speed" (less than 128 Kbit/sec) services are those who have chosen not to upgrade. However, there are still hundreds of thousands of people in rural and exurban areas who would love to have broadband service but can't get it at all due to expense or lack of availability, and hundreds of thousands more beyond that who have poor quality service but can't get anything better.
Going back to the original topic, those people like the GP with no broadband or poor broadband are the same people who'll be completely shut out of any kind of digital video distribution model, all of which are absolutely dependent on a good, high-speed data connection to function. I can't think of anyone who would willingly wait a week for a 20 GiB HD movie to download when they could drive up to the local movie rental store and take a BD or HD-DVD home within the hour. Those people are the reason why physical media will take a long, long time to die out completely, and until that happens, we'll continue to repeat the format wars over and over again.
If the point was shaming Nintendo into public disclosure of their environmental impacts, then the Greenpeace people would have done better to say so outright, rather than spin the "study" (I hesitate to call it that, as no real study was involved) as a blanket indictment of Nintendo's - or any other company's - environmental practices. To wit, instead of saying "Nintendo must be doing absolutely awful things to the environment because they didn't disclose their policies," they should have said "Nintendo didn't disclose its environmental policies, and we want to know why, since every other console manufacturer does." Regardless of their intent, their methods were dishonest, and that's what I take issue with. I agree that all companies and government agencies should disclose their environmental impacts, and if they have to be shamed into doing so, fine, but I do not think it's smart in either the short- or the long-term to use dishonest means to accomplish that end.
Instead of damaging or enhancing the reputations of the companies named in the report, the Greenpeace people have really damaged their own credibility and that of environmentalism at large. After all, if they have previously stated that their agenda includes disinformation and public attacks on popular companies to gain attention for their cause, how are people to know when they're telling the truth about other companies and when they're simply looking for easy PR? There's an element of crying wolf in their actions, and I think it's a disservice to all environmental movements when one or two act out in this manner.
So, if the information wasn't available on their Web site, did it ever occur to the Greenpeace researchers to send them an email or pick up a phone? Or ask a third party for independent confirmation of all three companies' environmental policies? I don't know ANYBODY in research or journalism that would consider a single source to be the end of their line of inquiry, and especially not when the single source is the digital equivalent of a corporate press release. As so many people have said before, lack of evidence does not mean automatic proof of guilt. Nintendo probably should have made that information more easily available, but that doesn't absolve Greenpeace from their responsibility to make certain of their facts before publishing something that purports to be based in fact.
When I wrote for my high school's newspaper, writing an article without clear, verifiable research from multiple sources was called "journalistic dishonesty." A first violation carried a one-semester suspension from staff; a second got you permanently dismissed and also sent you to the academic integrity board, which could throw you out of school entirely. Practically all of academia holds similarly strict policies. Would that Greenpeace researchers (or any researchers, really) were held to anything remotely resembling the same standard.
Yes, on three occasions - one between Me and 2K Professional, two between Vista and XP.
1) One of my uncles suffered through two years of Windows Me on his home laptop, patiently slogging through dozens of corrupted drivers, software incompatibilities and nonexistent networking support. The day the machine suffered a complete registry corruption was the day he decided to get rid of the albatross OS, and you've never seen a happier guy in your life than when that system booted to Windows 2000 for the first time.
2) A friend of my mother's upgraded the family desktop to Vista so her son could play Halo 2. Within three weeks, the entire family was begging to have Vista removed - father because none of his work programs would run under Vista, mother because her customer files from her Arbonne business didn't migrate properly, and son because all his games ran dog-slow and looked like garbage. I reinstalled XP for them, and there was much rejoicing.
3) The same uncle that ran afoul of Windows Me just purchased a top-end Dell XPS that came with Vista Home Premium and Office 2007 loaded, and according to him both programs are slower, buggier and generally more annoying than his old Me/97 install ever could have dreamed of being. Instead of bringing a fruit basket or a bottle of liquor to the family Christmas this year, he asked me for a drive wipe and XP install.
I believe that's already been done with the PC versions of Halo 2 and Shadowrun. I'm sure the rest of the Games For Windows catalogue, or at least the popular titles (Crysis, Mass Effect, et al) will follow in short order.
All the same, I think that enterprise users would probably riot if they were shoved into using Vista before Microsoft gets the bugs out. Home users historically haven't cared enough to complain, but people for whom a stable, secure, fast computer system means the difference between business and bankruptcy will drop Microsoft products like so many hot potatoes if they can't be assured that those products will meet their needs. Certainly they've done it before to other companies - witness the falls of WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase from business use. All three used to be business standards just as MS Office is the current standard, but all were discarded over extremely short intervals (usually one to three years) due to onerous licensing, platform lock-in, lack of requested features or support, or any combination thereof. Microsoft is kidding itself if it thinks MS Office is immune.
In my own experience, one does better with toys that can be upgraded to meet the child's increasing age and intelligence level than those that cater to one age level only. That eye-scope is clever, but it'll only be "good" for a very specific age range: those that are old enough to know about microscopic objects and organisms, but young enough not to find the massive eyeball design "kiddie." You'd be much better off with a standard microscope. I've also had good luck with building toys (erector sets, Legos and the like), as those can be expanded to grow with the child and can be passed down to other children. Finally, when all else fails, outdoor toys are always a good bet; I have yet to meet a boy or girl of any age who doesn't like "finding" things outside (flowers, rocks, sticks, animal tracks and whatnot). It's a great way to teach them about the life and earth sciences, and anything that gets kids, geeky or not, away from the TV is a good thing.
As to those that cried foul for product placement, this is a highly useful thread for people like me who refuse to buy the yearly crop of B.S. toys being flogged by Toys R Us and the like. Ever since I've had nieces and nephews, I have always tried to buy them toys that have educational value, and then attempt to teach them the science or logic behind the toy. However, I've found educational toys to be exceptionally hit-or-miss affairs, though, and more often than not they land me in Aunt Hell - the state in which your niece or nephew takes one look at the gift, says "Thanks, Aunt Lindsay" and runs away to play Maim-A-Thon XII for the PSWii60 that Grandma sent from Florida, convinced that you're the lamest grown-up ever to walk the earth. If someone else out there can tell me what toys have gone over well or not with their kids, I'd like to know so I can avoid a waste of money and/or good will.
Funny, that. We have a 32" HD CRT (1080i max), and while HD does provide a much clearer picture, the loss of screen real-estate from letterboxing actually makes it worse for sports and other programs with lots of action, which is where HD is supposed to shine. It's glaringly noticeable, for example, between ESPN and ESPN HD - on one channel the players are life-size, on the other they look like Lego men. Last weekend, when I turned on the Michigan/Michigan State game in HD, everyone yelled at me to turn it back. From the couch, which is about fifteen feet from the TV, they couldn't tell what was a Spartan and what was grass! To add insult to injury, we're stuck with the same size and type of TV till we move - the entertainment hutch is permanently built into the wall, and it will only accommodate a 34" or smaller TV cabinet. Sigh.
That's true for fresh frozen plasma, but the only patients that are getting FFP now are people with clotting disorders and rarely, patients with other blood dyscrasias. Ringer's lactate and D5W have been the fluids of choice for volume replacement for at least the last ten years. Moreover, FFP and acellular blood concentrates still contain clotting factors and complement proteins, which could conceivably be affected adversely by this process.
Again, not in this area. We have one department in the next county over that's notorious for handing out Basic Speed Law tickets on visual evidence alone. As in, it's a clear sunny summer day with minimal traffic on the road, the radar gun says you were doing 65 in a 70 zone, but the cop tickets you anyway because he claims you were going "too fast for road conditions." This particular department has admitted - in the newspaper, no less - that it's a noise abatement and revenue generation measure rather than any real effort toward traffic safety, and the nonstop ticketing (they frequently put six patrol cars on one particular stretch of freeway during rush hour and just ticket people in job lots) actually increases accidents because everyone panics, swerves and generally drives in an unsafe manner whenever they see the patrol cars. Despite all that, the judges all uphold the tickets anyway.
+1 to parent. I have an Audigy 2 ZS Notebook for my laptop, and getting that thing to run nicely alongside the onboard sound module is a gold plated, diamond encrusted pain in the anatomy. In the past I've had to install all kinds of proprietary drivers and blacklist the AC'97 modules to get the Audigy to work at all, and that's a less than optimal solution for lots of reasons - closed source, kills onboard speakers, ALSA required, and so on. Worse, neither Feisty nor Gutsy will suspend properly when the Audigy card is plugged in. I'm not sure how much of that can be fixed in kernel space, but it might be worthwhile for them to try.
Not where I live. Around here, all the cop has to do is show up to win a ticket - ANY ticket, be it for speeding, running a stop sign/light, illegal turn or whatever. Furthermore, regardless of what time the cop is supposed to be in court, the judge/magistrate will usually make you wait till he/she gets there, thereby depriving you of a possible default dismissal.
I've also been convicted on obviously inadequate or downright forged evidence, as when a cop pulled me over for running a red light and illegal left turn. (I started my left when the light was still yellow, but the cop claimed it turned red before I got through the intersection.) When I challenged the ticket, he produced a DVD-RW from his car's camera that purported to show me running the light, except he had to do the playback on a Windows machine, not a standalone DVD player. The video file he opened was dated "last edited" the day before the court date, not the day I got the ticket, and the video didn't start till I was already pulled over. When I pointed those discrepancies out to the judge, he said "Well, Officer Smith said you ran the light, and I see no reason to doubt him" and handed me a $250 fine.
Funny, that. My mother refused to have me kid-printed when the friendly local law enforcement officer came to our school, but it wasn't because she felt that I should be able to run away - far from it. She didn't want my fingerprints, or any other identifying information, where the cops could get their hands on it. (Our local constabulary wasn't exactly known for its stringent adherence to due process, particularly where kids were concerned.)
That said, my parents always knew where I was, or at least who I was with. I had a few out-of-bounds areas (must be within two miles of home or school if unaccompanied, no riding bikes on major roads unless the road has a sidewalk), and I had to let them know if I was going to stay late at school or go to a friend's house, but other than that, they trusted that I was smart enough to stay away from trouble. (Either that, or they recognized that I was less likely to cause trouble if I was outside burning up energy than cooped in the house with nothing to do.)
Marines and Navy corpsmen already carry packets of a material called QuickClot - it's a rapid coagulant that will seal just about any bleeding injury within a few seconds. There have been cases where guys were shot through the neck, treated themselves (!) with this stuff and lived. Between that and the self-sealing, self-applicable dressing for sucking chest wounds, your average G.I. Joe or Jane can survive just about any wound to the point of first care. The problem is definitive treatment - putting the injured soldier back together to the point where he or she can serve again, or failing that, function adequately in the civilian world. As a result of saving so many of these guys that would have died on the field thirty or forty years ago, we're now seeing a whole new crop of battlefield injuries that weren't known before because people didn't survive to develop them before. Traumatic brain injury and peripheral nerve damage is a biggie, as are multiple amputations, short bowel syndrome from abdominal wounds, and chronic cardiopulmonary deficits from chest wounds.
We're pretty good at trauma care nowadays. What we're still learning is rehabilitation care.
You're right - sorry about that. R + left stick was for free-aiming, L was for lock-on.
(writing on blackboard, "I will check my comments before posting")
That's something of an occupational hazard when playing Metroid Prime 3. I'm fairly sure that Samus could claim worker's compensation for job-related repetitive strain injuries by now - after all, she's spent most of her adult life running around with her right arm stuck straight out in front of her. :P
I do agree about the nunchuck controls being rather fiddly. It gets particularly annoying when whatever you're trying to do has a time limit - in fact, I ran afoul of it last night. When trying to kill certain bosses, notably one that bears a massive resemblance to a human cerebrum, you have a very short interval to yank the boss' armor off when it's stunned. Frequently you'll grapple onto the thing, whip your left arm around like a madwoman for five seconds to absolutely no avail, and then it shakes you off and you're back to square one. I'm not sure if it's due to a poor software interface or just the limitations of the nunchuck's accelerometer.
That said, the rest of the control scheme is very, very good once you get used to it. It's not perfect, but it's orders of magnitude better than the old twin analog scheme they used in MP1 and 2.
Hell, we're jealous of the platforms and powertrains the European models get! There's an amazing amount of innovation that goes on in the Big Three and its supply satellites. However, the vast majority of what they invent can't or won't be sold here because either:
A) some dumb cluck Congressman decreed that every American-built car must include $GIZMO that would completely invalidate, destroy, etc. said innovation; or
B) some dumb cluck marketer decided that "Americans will never buy" said innovation, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Every year, if you read the News and the Free Press coverage of the Detroit auto show, they're absolutely drooling over the scores of shiny, slick new models, and then it turns out that it's all destined for the European and Asian markets. Meanwhile, we just get the same lame sedan, minivan and SUV retreads with the same lame 3.0L V6 and 4.7L V8 that we've gotten every new model-year since 1997. Is it any wonder that everyone else's imports are eating our lunch?
Several countries have already tried that with this generation. I guess being paid less than minimum wage to go off to foreign lands, get shot/blown up/psychologically destroyed, and then be discarded once you return doesn't appeal to people so much anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for our armed forces, but they've done a fabulous job of making themselves irrelevant in the modern era, largely because military service has gone from stepping stone to dead end. It used to be that you could join the $BRANCH_OF_SERVICE, spend a few years serving and come out with some useful job skills and/or access to higher education. Now, all you can do after getting out is go back to the same minimum wage job you left - assuming it hasn't been outsourced to China.
I suspect the problem with Gen Y and future generations isn't laziness so much as apathy. I also suspect that the same problem is behind the cultural changes in Japan and other similarly structured nations. It used to be that there was a reciprocal arrangement between you and your employer: loyalty for loyalty. You gave your hard work to the company, and in return the company took care of you. Now that the companies don't give two hoots for their employees, employees don't care about the company. (We in the Detroit area are seeing that on a massive scale with the fall of the Midsized Three.) If nothing you do is worth anything, everyone's expendable, there is no security and there is no way out, why bother?
QuarkXPress used to do the same thing, except the hardware key went between the keyboard and the machine, which frequently broke the machine when it failed to recognize that it still had a keyboard attached to it. I went through that particular flavor of hell in high school when we upgraded to Quark 4, and installing fifty of those little buggers was fun times, let me tell you. "Dongle" became a rather popular swear word in the weeks following the upgrade.
I agree with the parent poster about not having too many issues regarding the activation of Windows XP. I rarely ran afoul of such problems in my former life as a techie for hire, and I haven't had it happen yet to any of the machines I personally support. However, I must disagree about the amount of trialware and associated crap that comes loaded on a standard machine for purchase. Quite honestly, it's staggering.
The most recent time I had to re-image my mom's laptop (an Inspiron E1705) from the Dell recovery disk, I spent about an hour in the actual re-imaging process and three and a half hours after that cleaning out all the trialware. IIRC, the total "software I don't want" loadout came to three ISP "free trials," AIM, a massive package of games, Microsoft Works and associated crud (this on a machine that was supposed to come with MS Office preloaded), free trials of Quicken, Norton Antivirus, Rhapsody, MusicMatch, Paint Shop Pro and some photo management program, and a massive pile of completely useless Dell "support" software. All but three of those (the games, the photo manager and one of the ISP trials) required a restart after removal. Digging all the trial garbage out of the system also left the registry in horribly messy condition, which required an additional thirty minutes or so to clean up. This, of course, doesn't count the multiple restarts required by Windows Update.
In the game of installing crap I don't want, though, I think the only company that beats Dell is Hewlett Packard. Why, why, WHY do they not simply offer a straight driver for their equipment? My printer is a bare-bones inkjet. All I want it to do is print text. I do not want to manage my photos, nor do I want to print photos from it. I do not want "HP Creativity Solutions." I do not want the printer to nag me about buying Genuine HP Ink Cartridges, nor do I want it to phone home every day and nag me about New And Exciting Products From HP. And for the life of me, I do not want to install 47 Mb of garbage for a driver that should be 50 Kb at most.
Given all that rigamarole, I can understand why people might think a pirated version of any given program beats the recovery disk. It's not a decision I would make for myself - to paraphrase the classic parental line, I don't know where that program has been - but I understand where they're coming from.
(Full disclosure: The author's machine runs Ubuntu. Other members of her family use systems including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X.)
I'll start being worried when the sexaroids' spines start glowing bright red during the act.
Then again, given the opportunity to nail Tricia Helfer, Lucy Lawless AND Grace Park, I suspect most men would consider a little global nuclear holocaust to be a fair tradeoff...
Prior to the no-fly insanity, my parents flew an average of 50,000 miles per year for both business and recreation. Almost all of it was paid travel (i.e. not frequent flyer rewards), too. I wonder what that loss, repeated among thousands of no-fly condemned travelers, represents to Northwest or United or whoever your hometown airline might be.
Please put down the flamethrower, sir. You're apt to hurt yourself with that thing.
The IRS reimbursement rate as of November 2006 is 48.5 cents/mile, which is what I used to calculate the cost per trip. Of that, gas is $12.80. (Her car, which is a midsize sedan for your information, averages 25 MPG according to its trip computer. That equates to 4 gallons at $3.20/gallon.) The rest goes toward lease payments, insurance, maintenance et al. Had I only compared the costs based on the price of gas, Amtrak would look like an even worse deal - it's over twice as expensive per round trip.
In the weeks and months after 9/11, I researched various ways to get from my residence in Boston to my family's home in metro Detroit in case of another air travel moratorium. The distance is 622 miles direct, or about 650 overland.
Flying: 1h45m in the air, 3 hours door-to-door (fifteen minutes on the T from my dorm to Logan, and we live about 30 minutes from Detroit Metro). A ticket then was about $300 in coach.
Driving: Approximately 14-16 hours, depending on whether you go up across Ontario or down through Pennsylvania. Assuming you're old enough to rent a car (which I wasn't - minimum age in Massachusetts is 25), a compact rental one-way was about $250, plus $50 for two tanks of gas.
Rail: 20-28 hours, minimum of three train changes and a bus transfer. Assuming I could cross the border and get on VIA Rail (Boston-Buffalo-Toronto, Toronto-Windsor, bus across to Detroit, Detroit-Birmingham), total travel time was 20 hours. Staying in the States, the route ran Boston-Albany, Albany-Toledo, bus to Detroit, Detroit-Birmingham and timed out at 28 hours. Cheapest ticket was $400.
Fast forward to the present. My mom works in Ann Arbor, and we're looking for ways to cut down on her commute. The drive is 50 miles one-way and takes about 45 minutes (there's rarely any traffic at the hours she drives). She must be at work no later than 0630, as the operating rooms open at 0700. We figured out that each day's round trip costs $48.50 at the current mileage rate. Amtrak only costs $28 round-trip, but the trip takes 1h30 one-way and the first morning train doesn't leave till 0653. The train doesn't even really work for students, as there are only three trains going through Ann Arbor on any given day and the train station is about as far distant from campus as you can get.
And Amtrak wonders why they're irrelevant everywhere but the Northeast Corridor...
Two words: Hannah Montana.
The soulless marketing demon that came up with this dreck should be drawn, quartered and stabbed through the ears. Because that's about what listening to it feels like. Especially if you happen to be cooped up in a car full of children at the time.
Interesting, because among my parents it's the exact opposite. Dad cannot stand ANYTHING animated - not comedy, not action, not drama, doesn't matter if it's hand-drawn, CGI, Claymation or whatever. He refuses to watch any of my anime collection, walked out of Finding Nemo, and hid in the basement the entire time his grandchildren came to visit because they insisted that he watch Thomas the Tank Engine with them. He absolutely adores counterterrorism shoot-em-up stuff like The Unit and 24, but when I tried to get him to watch Stand Alone Complex, he couldn't get away from the TV fast enough. Cowboy Bebop didn't even make it past the opening credits. Gaming doesn't make any sense to him, either. When we got a Wii this Christmas, he fooled with Wii Sports for about three minutes to be polite and then promptly ran downstairs. I went after him to see what the problem was, and found him watching some lame HBO romantic comedy (!). When I asked him what in the name of all that is good and holy he was watching, he replied, "It's better than that cartoon s***." I tried to get him to play Call Of Duty 3, thinking that maybe a WWII sim might be more his speed, but he only got thirty seconds, maybe a minute into the game before developing motion sickness. To this day, he believes that everyone who watches "cartoons" or plays games past the age of 5 or so must be smoking dope. This includes his own wife and children (see below). Meanwhile, Mom is a South Park and Family Guy devotee, thoroughly enjoyed Noir and Cowboy Bebop, and regularly kicks my butt in the vast majority of video games (about the only type of game I can beat her at is first-person shooters). Go figure.