The same inspection also caught a failed AE-35 antenna control module, which was removed and replaced. The defective module was tested and found to be in perfect working order; NASA spokepeople point to human error as the cause of the problem.
Sadly (particularly in the Chozo and Luminoth lore) the logbook scans suffer from the same problem as many video games: when it comes to writing in-game text, the writers sound like pretentious English majors...
To be fair, though, the Chozo and the Luminoth come off as pretty pretentious people throughout the games, sometimes verging into total asshattery (U-Mos, I'm looking at you), so it would make sense that their lores sound like Holy Writ. The GFMC and the Pirate entries were much more down-to-earth (see also: 'If [SPC Angseth] wants to believe in Bigfoot, or Santa Claus, or Samus Aran, that's fine,' 'Do not feed the metroids,' 'Science Team thinks metroids can be domesticated - I think Science Team has vapor for brains,' etc).
Just once, I'd like to see a Chozo Lore where they gripe about Hatchling blowing up every Chozo ruin she sets foot in. You have to think that's got to tick them off eventually...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall reading something similar in one of the original Battlestar Galactica novelizations (the one about the big-ass laser on the ice planet - I forget the title). According to that novel, "Caprican tragedy" was a theatre form in which the actors would enact two endings, showing the results from changing a main character's pivotal choice at some other point in the play - to wit, what would happen if Romeo didn't kill himself before Juliet woke up, or if Jean Valjean simply took the Bishop's silver and ran.
Interesting idea, though I imagine it'd be a pain for the actors!
Personally, I think it's amusing how we contort ourselves into rhetorical knots trying to describe an object as a work of art, when in all likelihood the "artist" knows damned well it's not art, nor did he/she put any work into it, and is just having a fabulous laugh at the critics' and the public's expense. People who claim a urinal tilted on its side is "curvaceous, vitreous and partially reflective" and "represents the imposition of the artist's will on the resulting work of art" are either pretentious gits or completely delusional.
If someone relieves their bowels in Central Park, is that art? Some art critics would say that it is - it challenges perceptions, it can be interpreted on many levels, and it provokes thought and criticism. However, there comes a point when art, regardless of what medium it comes in, has to justify its classification as art, and at some point, the art critic must face up to the fact that this "work of art" is, in fact, a turd. It's not "a self-contained palette of hues and textures" or "a defiant act of humanity against the sterile modern world,"* it's either vandalism or public indecency. Meanwhile, plenty of better art ("better" in the sense that it has aesthetic value in addition to the the points previously mentioned) exists all around us, and yes, in video games as well.
Ebert, and the vast majority of art critics, wouldn't know art if it bit them, and that goes for ALL the arts, including cinema and interactive entertainment.
*...and I can't believe I actually said that about a turd. Perhaps I should look for a career in art criticism?
University of Michigan's been pretty good about it so far, I think. They have a "DMCA agent" who reviews infringement claims and warns suspected individuals that they're being targeted for action. If you actually infringed on someone's copyright, i.e. distributed music, movies, etc. on the U's networks, then it's on you to remove the infringing material and deal with the complainant. If you didn't, though, the DMCA agent will tell the complainant to fsck off on your behalf and tell you where to find your own legal shark. It's not ideal, but it's a hell of a lot better than "Hello Joe Student, we got this nasty letter about activities that may or may not have been committed, that may or may not be illegal, that may or may not be associated with an IP address that you may or may not have used at some point in the past. Now kindly bend over and smile."
These clowns overreached enough when they targeted the public Ivies on that list (Penn State, Ohio State, Minnesota et al), but they must be downright mad to go after Missouri Rolla. Why in the name of all that is good would you want to piss off a school full of explosive demolition engineers?
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband. Because the government will set "standards" of speed, this leaves smaller providers -- who may still be able to provide acceptable speeds -- out of the market. If you won't be able to give the minimum, get out of the market.
Since when is the broadband market free at all?
Any new ISP that wants to enter a given market area first has to have an infrastructure over which to provide service. If our Local ISP Co. tries to build its own, either the big players' political flacks delay and/or deny it the permits to do so, or they get the permits but the cost of the equipment exceeds the projected revenue; either way Local ISP Co. goes out of business. If Local ISP Co. buys infrastructure access and bandwidth from some Big Broadband Corp. that already serves that market, Local ISP Co. gets stepped on directly (smear advertising, messing with Local ISP Co.'s bandwidth, etc) until it goes out of business or gets bought up by Big Broadband Corp. In most communities, that process results in 0-3 broadband providers, all of whom use one of two pricing models: 1) tiered service that's no better than 56K dialup at the bottom and so-so at the top, or 2) very expensive flat-rate service that's decent as long as your local circuit isn't being throttled down.
Second, free markets are powerful things, but a free market only works if the consumer is smart enough to recognize the difference between a good and a bad product, and has the ability to buy from someone else if a given company's products or prices don't meet with what the consumer wants or thinks is fair. That system is relatively effective for tangible goods, because most people can physically recognize the difference between something that's worth their money - i.e. a well-made or high-quality product - and something that's not, and for most products, there are a lot of companies the customer can choose to buy from. With broadband, and with much of consumer-level computing in general, the consumer doesn't know a thing about the product or service beyond what the advertising copy says. Most of us have experienced or heard of people who believe that their 56K dialup service that actually achieves 28.8 on a good day is "broadband" because you start it with a little rocket icon on the desktop. Further, if the product or service doesn't do what it claims, the consumer has no recourse. If someone decides that Big Broadband Corp. or AllMedia Inc.'s service sucks, there is no Local ISP Co. for him to give his business to (see above).
Here's why I am against Net Neutrality -- instead of providing for a truly "neutral" pipe, regulations like these will be written by the strongest elements in a market, designed to kill the smaller competitors.
Exactly - the current bill doesn't provide for net neutrality at all, and neither will any bill proposed in challenge to it, thanks to the political lobbies of the major telecommunication players. The only recourse is for a government agency to step in, but whatever agency does so (the Senate, the FCC, the FTC, whoever) has a Hobson's choice. All of the regulatory options available - requiring a certain number of carriers per market, or requiring a certain level of service - work against competition for the reasons you mentioned, and doing nothing invariably results in monopoly or duopoly. As unpalatable as government regulation can be, in this case and in several other historical examples (see also: Pure Food and Drug Act, Sherman Act, telephone deregulation/Bell breakup), it has been the only option to ensure that the consumer has some protection from corporate malfeasance. Until a majority of the Congress grows a spine and stands up to the lobbyists, it's the least evil of a number of very evil choices.
Astronaut: Houston, we seem to have several thousand pounds less fuel than the computer says. We're going to try an unpowered landing--
(crash noise, and then "NO SIGNAL")
NASA flight controller: And we thought we were getting such a bargain, outsourcing the fuel systems to Canada...
I'm aware of that, just as I'm aware that some of those games would have flopped miserably with online functionality (e.g. Metroid is fairly unique as a one-player adventure, but throw in competitive online and it gets creamed by all the other established FPS franchises). My only point was that online play, be it co-op or competitive, was trumpeted as the killer functionality for all three of the current-gen consoles, but when it came down to it, at least one marquee franchise for each console wound up without at least some portion of its intended online functions. I wondered why that was, since as another poster said, all six companies (Activision, Retro and Bungie; SCE, Nintendo and Microsoft) have been doing online gaming for years, and end users have come up with several ways to circumvent or eliminate the networking issues that go along with online play. What would cause such a string of online oopsies, and why now? This is especially puzzling with the 360, since it's been out for almost two years - you'd think the devs would have worked all the kinks out of online functionality by now.
Perhaps it's hardware problems, perhaps it's console-manufacturer idiocy, perhaps the software designers are still getting used to the new platforms. I just thought it was interesting that ALL the consoles, not just one or two, would suffer such problems. If the online problems were limited to one, you could blame it on that console or the company that makes it, but to see it across three platforms tends to point toward some hitherto unrecognized limit on online console gaming.
It worked just fine with my v60 - I got it on eBay, advertised as an ex-Sprint phone, and had it activated at a Verizon store with no problems. Grant you, one of the v60s was part of Verizon's lineup at the time (the one with push-to-talk - v60P, I think?), so I don't know for sure if you can take some completely unrelated phone from one network to the other. However, given that your average cellular company CSR has the intelligence of grilled cheese, I doubt most of them would recognize such an ESN mismatch or even care.
Just my experience - does anyone else have input on this?
It seems like a disturbing number of new releases have had their online play options severely curtailed or omitted entirely. Witness Tony Hawk (PS3), Metroid Prime 3 (Wii), and now Halo 3 (360) - and I'm sure there are a bunch I'm forgetting. Surely all these companies can't be having trouble putting together workable online play for their latest titles?
As long as it's a CDMA phone, you can have it activated on either network regardless of whose phone it started life as, but you need to watch to make sure it's E911 compatible. Most of the classic, bombproof old phones aren't. I got burned on that with my old Motorola v60, and the StarTAC I had before that - those two were the greatest phones ever, got great battery life and made calls from anywhere, but the Verizon tech told me (incorrectly, as it turns out) that I would be forced to get a new phone because my old one wasn't E911 compliant.
Minor unit error - sea level pressure is 101.3 kPa, or 14.7 psi. 30 kPa comes out to about 4.4 psi - which is actually right in line with current EVA suits, which can run anywhere from 3.0 to 4.7 psi. (Note that you're breathing pure O2 in those suits. An O2 partial pressure of 3 psi comes out to about 10 psi of normal air, which is what you get in a commercial airliner).
it would have to fit everywhere exactly, down to the gonads.
Which is exactly why you need to have women in these suits - much less irregularity to worry about...
No, seriously. You can mechanically pressurize large and/or regular areas of the body (torso, limbs, etc), and use localized gas bladders for irregular areas (genitalia, hands/feet, etc). As for the head, that's easy; use a pressure helmet with a neck seal and feed breathing gas into that, just like dry-suit divers do.
Not long before it closed, my local CompUSA put up "help lights" throughout the store - square plastic boxes with huge red ? on them. You don't know how tempted I was to punch one and see if there were coins inside.
Based on the number of dings the boxes sustained in the four months they were up, I'm sure more than one person saw the same resemblance...
Amen to that. Cable coverage isn't any better, and abandon all hope once you get more than 20 miles or so from downtown. People in north Oakland, north Macomb, western Wayne and Washtenaw are basically restricted to options 2 and 3 (dial or fsck yourself). Even in Bloomfield Hills, we weren't eligible for anything above 56K dial-up (which was actually 19.2 because the phone lines out here date to the Eisenhower administration and the company formerly known as Michigan Bell/Ameritech/SBC/AT&T repeatedly refused to replace them) until 2003.
And we wonder why all those dot-com era projects that promised to turn the tri-county area into a tech Mecca fell on their faces...
Failed, failed and failed to all three. My old HS was one of the first in the nation (1999-2000 school year) to implement this kind of program, and it flopped dismally.
* The CD-ROM textbooks (all three of them that actually came on CD-ROM) were all at least one edition behind the print variants, and had no provision for taking notes, highlighting, etc. What good is a biology text on CD-ROM if you have to lug the 10 lb book it was supposed to replace along with it?
* Internet references weren't allowed for either in-class discussion or as cited references in papers. Any paper that contained Internet material was an instant 50% (our version of an F). Reason? Nobody fact-checks Internet material (as all us Slashdot types have learned so many times).
* I don't know too many people who count using AIM, P2P clients and warez as a valid educational use of laptops. All of which became pandemic on our network within about three days of rolling out the laptops. Meanwhile, the kids who actually had a use for the machines couldn't because our servers crashed at least once a day as a result of the torrent of viruses, spam, etc being pumped out of hundreds of compromised laptops.
There's a device called a Chemex pot that does exactly what you suggest, and a lot of coffee enthusiasts think it's the ideal way of making coffee because it allows you to control the entire process. Everything's manual, and the pot itself looks like an Erlenmeyer flask with a funnel on top. You pour boiling water over fresh coffee grounds that are contained in a paper filter cone stuck in the vessel's upper chamber (the funnel), and coffee drips into the lower chamber (the flask).
Coffee enthusiasts will also tell you that any brew temperature under 200 F/93 C is unacceptable for the same reasons you outlined for tea, although you should never consume coffee (or any other hot beverage, for that matter) at a temperature above 140 F/60 C.
The combined set of all those other senses is called proprioception - the ability to sense the condition of one's body and local conditions that may affect it. Proprioception gives you a sense of the space around you, how you occupy it and how other objects interact with you and it. Some people do their proprioceptive processing more consciously than others, which may account for another good portion of the "sixth sense" phenomenon. (For example, when you "unconsciously" detect the presence of an assailant behind you, you're probably doing it by sensing a change in temperature or air pressure, rather than through some psychic phenomenon.)
"Blindsight" and its companion state, the Riddoch phenomenon, more properly refers to the ability of a brain that's lost most or all of its conscious input from some sensory function (vision, hearing, etc) to continue to subconsciously process the same information in lower-order processing centers. Using the example of a patient who's blind from an occipital lobe injury but still has functional eyeballs, the patient is consciously aware of being blind and sees nothing (NLP blindness) on a formal vision exam, yet manages to avoid moving objects (Riddoch) and can negotiate an unfamiliar room (blindsight), all at a much better rate than chance would predict. Although no visual processing is being executed in the occipital cortex, there's still activity occurring in the lateral geniculate nuclei (low-order edge tracing, motion tracking, etc), and that information contributes to an unconscious "view" of the patient's environment.
IANA- disclaimer: I hold no advanced degrees in neuroscience, but I do have my undergraduate degree in the field (B.S. biological psych/cognitive neuroscience,) and I did a lot of volunteering with visually impaired patients in high school and college. (I wanted to be either an ophthalmologist or a neurologist back then. The field still fascinates me, although I've since put the pursuit of an MD on long-term hiatus.)
That's primarily for two reasons: 1) healthcare providers absolutely MUST retain backwards compatibility with whatever archaic, proprietary records systems they bought back in the 70's and 80's, and 2) they can't or won't afford anything better. As an example, the hospital my dad works at offers cutting-edge (pardon the pun) patient care across dozens of specialties, but they're still using a patient records system called HDS Ulticare that they purchased in... wait for it... 1983. This facility's IT complement is fairly modern by healthcare standards, too; I can think of a few places, respected teaching hospitals at that, that are still using the original 1960s-1970s POMR and Regenstreif punch-card systems.
Meanwhile, my dad's office ran all Windows 95 machines until about a month ago, and one machine in the set had to be run in straight MS-DOS 6.2 (?!?) in order to run the hospital's surgical scheduling software, which will not tolerate any form of emulation whatsoever. They're slightly better off now, with four XP machines and a Linux server, but they still have to keep that one DOS box until the hospital upgrades, which will probably be around the 37th of Janunever. To add insult to injury, the other surgeon in his practice pitched a fit about the expense of new computers, and he only agreed to upgrade under the condition that half the bill (it was about $7,000 total) come out of Dad's pocket. The two of them, and by extension nearly all the physicians and surgeons I know, will spare no expense for better patient care (learning new procedures, etc), but they see IT as a poor investment at best and a waste of money in most cases.
If a patient presents to the emergency department with a life-threatening condition and can't consent to treatment for whatever reason (unconsciousness, altered mental status, patient is a minor, etc), the staff will assume that the patient wants to be treated according to best medical practices. It's called "implied consent," and it's invoked on a daily basis in every ED in the world. We've never been in the habit of letting people die for any reason, and certainly not because someone couldn't get out of a movie theatre fast enough to issue a consent for a non-competent patient.
I also wouldn't worry about missing truly urgent calls in one of these theatres. Just have patrons do what on-call physicians and surgeons have been doing for decades: check their phones/pagers with the theatre manager when they arrive, and the manager sends someone to fetch them if the device goes off. The real emergencies can be handled quickly, and everyone gets to enjoy an uninterrupted show.
I have a pair of Bose QC2s, and while they work wonders on cabin noise, they don't filter out voices nearly as well. (Probably this is a safety feature.) I'm much more fond of in-ear monitor type headphones - souped-up earbuds that seal themselves in your ears with a pair of foam or silicone tips. Brilliant sound quality and 20+ dB noise reduction across all frequencies... what's not to like?
My old high school, in a lot of ways, was the "beta" for HTH. In 1998, one of our leading alumni, a guy by the name of Steve Ballmer, came to the headmaster and the board of trustees with a proposition. Every teacher and student in the Middle School and Upper School - a swatch of kids from Grades 6-12 - would be issued their very own Dell laptop with Win2K, MS Office, and a whole suite of learning software. Both school buildings would be upgraded to 100 Mbit Ethernet in all rooms with new servers to run it all, and our humble little prep school was going to usher in a great new era of educational wizardry, where all your books would come on CD, teachers would work from Powerpoint, classes would interact on digital whiteboards, homework would be submitted electronically, everything from grades to cafeteria menus would be available on the school Intranet, and so on.
Suffice to say it didn't quite work out as planned.
I volunteered as a helpdesk tech during the first school year of the "Knowledge Technologies" program, 1999-2000, and it was a mess from start to finish. I saw every machine in the school at least once for any combination of system formatting/re-imaging and hardware repair/replacement - from screens to hard drives, you name it, some kid broke it, and usually more than once. Fully half the students' computers and 75% of the teachers' were infected with viruses and spyware at any given time. Since all but a handful of the teachers (who were brilliant with pens, paper and chalk, mind you) were technologically incompetent, most kids goofed off in class reading various message boards, downloading music/movies/warez, or looking at porn. Oh, and all that shiny happy PR stuff about textbooks on CD and digital cooperative lectures? Vaporware.
I went back for an alumni event last year. They're still stumbling along with the laptop program, only now the network is 802.11g and the operating system is XP. They still don't have digital textbooks, and the equipment still chokes and dies on a regular basis. Kids still have to print off their homework and hand it in the old-fashioned way. And they're not one iota more technologically able, on average, than we were in 1998.
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The same inspection also caught a failed AE-35 antenna control module, which was removed and replaced. The defective module was tested and found to be in perfect working order; NASA spokepeople point to human error as the cause of the problem.
To be fair, though, the Chozo and the Luminoth come off as pretty pretentious people throughout the games, sometimes verging into total asshattery (U-Mos, I'm looking at you), so it would make sense that their lores sound like Holy Writ. The GFMC and the Pirate entries were much more down-to-earth (see also: 'If [SPC Angseth] wants to believe in Bigfoot, or Santa Claus, or Samus Aran, that's fine,' 'Do not feed the metroids,' 'Science Team thinks metroids can be domesticated - I think Science Team has vapor for brains,' etc).
Just once, I'd like to see a Chozo Lore where they gripe about Hatchling blowing up every Chozo ruin she sets foot in. You have to think that's got to tick them off eventually...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall reading something similar in one of the original Battlestar Galactica novelizations (the one about the big-ass laser on the ice planet - I forget the title). According to that novel, "Caprican tragedy" was a theatre form in which the actors would enact two endings, showing the results from changing a main character's pivotal choice at some other point in the play - to wit, what would happen if Romeo didn't kill himself before Juliet woke up, or if Jean Valjean simply took the Bishop's silver and ran.
Interesting idea, though I imagine it'd be a pain for the actors!
Personally, I think it's amusing how we contort ourselves into rhetorical knots trying to describe an object as a work of art, when in all likelihood the "artist" knows damned well it's not art, nor did he/she put any work into it, and is just having a fabulous laugh at the critics' and the public's expense. People who claim a urinal tilted on its side is "curvaceous, vitreous and partially reflective" and "represents the imposition of the artist's will on the resulting work of art" are either pretentious gits or completely delusional.
...and I can't believe I actually said that about a turd. Perhaps I should look for a career in art criticism?
If someone relieves their bowels in Central Park, is that art? Some art critics would say that it is - it challenges perceptions, it can be interpreted on many levels, and it provokes thought and criticism. However, there comes a point when art, regardless of what medium it comes in, has to justify its classification as art, and at some point, the art critic must face up to the fact that this "work of art" is, in fact, a turd. It's not "a self-contained palette of hues and textures" or "a defiant act of humanity against the sterile modern world,"* it's either vandalism or public indecency. Meanwhile, plenty of better art ("better" in the sense that it has aesthetic value in addition to the the points previously mentioned) exists all around us, and yes, in video games as well.
Ebert, and the vast majority of art critics, wouldn't know art if it bit them, and that goes for ALL the arts, including cinema and interactive entertainment.
*
These clowns overreached enough when they targeted the public Ivies on that list (Penn State, Ohio State, Minnesota et al), but they must be downright mad to go after Missouri Rolla. Why in the name of all that is good would you want to piss off a school full of explosive demolition engineers?
Any new ISP that wants to enter a given market area first has to have an infrastructure over which to provide service. If our Local ISP Co. tries to build its own, either the big players' political flacks delay and/or deny it the permits to do so, or they get the permits but the cost of the equipment exceeds the projected revenue; either way Local ISP Co. goes out of business. If Local ISP Co. buys infrastructure access and bandwidth from some Big Broadband Corp. that already serves that market, Local ISP Co. gets stepped on directly (smear advertising, messing with Local ISP Co.'s bandwidth, etc) until it goes out of business or gets bought up by Big Broadband Corp. In most communities, that process results in 0-3 broadband providers, all of whom use one of two pricing models: 1) tiered service that's no better than 56K dialup at the bottom and so-so at the top, or 2) very expensive flat-rate service that's decent as long as your local circuit isn't being throttled down.
Second, free markets are powerful things, but a free market only works if the consumer is smart enough to recognize the difference between a good and a bad product, and has the ability to buy from someone else if a given company's products or prices don't meet with what the consumer wants or thinks is fair. That system is relatively effective for tangible goods, because most people can physically recognize the difference between something that's worth their money - i.e. a well-made or high-quality product - and something that's not, and for most products, there are a lot of companies the customer can choose to buy from. With broadband, and with much of consumer-level computing in general, the consumer doesn't know a thing about the product or service beyond what the advertising copy says. Most of us have experienced or heard of people who believe that their 56K dialup service that actually achieves 28.8 on a good day is "broadband" because you start it with a little rocket icon on the desktop. Further, if the product or service doesn't do what it claims, the consumer has no recourse. If someone decides that Big Broadband Corp. or AllMedia Inc.'s service sucks, there is no Local ISP Co. for him to give his business to (see above).
Exactly - the current bill doesn't provide for net neutrality at all, and neither will any bill proposed in challenge to it, thanks to the political lobbies of the major telecommunication players. The only recourse is for a government agency to step in, but whatever agency does so (the Senate, the FCC, the FTC, whoever) has a Hobson's choice. All of the regulatory options available - requiring a certain number of carriers per market, or requiring a certain level of service - work against competition for the reasons you mentioned, and doing nothing invariably results in monopoly or duopoly. As unpalatable as government regulation can be, in this case and in several other historical examples (see also: Pure Food and Drug Act, Sherman Act, telephone deregulation/Bell breakup), it has been the only option to ensure that the consumer has some protection from corporate malfeasance. Until a majority of the Congress grows a spine and stands up to the lobbyists, it's the least evil of a number of very evil choices.Astronaut: Houston, we seem to have several thousand pounds less fuel than the computer says. We're going to try an unpowered landing--
(crash noise, and then "NO SIGNAL")
NASA flight controller: And we thought we were getting such a bargain, outsourcing the fuel systems to Canada...
Perhaps it's hardware problems, perhaps it's console-manufacturer idiocy, perhaps the software designers are still getting used to the new platforms. I just thought it was interesting that ALL the consoles, not just one or two, would suffer such problems. If the online problems were limited to one, you could blame it on that console or the company that makes it, but to see it across three platforms tends to point toward some hitherto unrecognized limit on online console gaming.
As always, that's just my observation.
Just my experience - does anyone else have input on this?
It seems like a disturbing number of new releases have had their online play options severely curtailed or omitted entirely. Witness Tony Hawk (PS3), Metroid Prime 3 (Wii), and now Halo 3 (360) - and I'm sure there are a bunch I'm forgetting. Surely all these companies can't be having trouble putting together workable online play for their latest titles?
As long as it's a CDMA phone, you can have it activated on either network regardless of whose phone it started life as, but you need to watch to make sure it's E911 compatible. Most of the classic, bombproof old phones aren't. I got burned on that with my old Motorola v60, and the StarTAC I had before that - those two were the greatest phones ever, got great battery life and made calls from anywhere, but the Verizon tech told me (incorrectly, as it turns out) that I would be forced to get a new phone because my old one wasn't E911 compliant.
Minor unit error - sea level pressure is 101.3 kPa, or 14.7 psi. 30 kPa comes out to about 4.4 psi - which is actually right in line with current EVA suits, which can run anywhere from 3.0 to 4.7 psi. (Note that you're breathing pure O2 in those suits. An O2 partial pressure of 3 psi comes out to about 10 psi of normal air, which is what you get in a commercial airliner).
Which is exactly why you need to have women in these suits - much less irregularity to worry about...
No, seriously. You can mechanically pressurize large and/or regular areas of the body (torso, limbs, etc), and use localized gas bladders for irregular areas (genitalia, hands/feet, etc). As for the head, that's easy; use a pressure helmet with a neck seal and feed breathing gas into that, just like dry-suit divers do.
And it will be unanimous if you can get a suitably skimpy bikini under that thing.
Based on the number of dings the boxes sustained in the four months they were up, I'm sure more than one person saw the same resemblance...
And we wonder why all those dot-com era projects that promised to turn the tri-county area into a tech Mecca fell on their faces...
* The CD-ROM textbooks (all three of them that actually came on CD-ROM) were all at least one edition behind the print variants, and had no provision for taking notes, highlighting, etc. What good is a biology text on CD-ROM if you have to lug the 10 lb book it was supposed to replace along with it?
* Internet references weren't allowed for either in-class discussion or as cited references in papers. Any paper that contained Internet material was an instant 50% (our version of an F). Reason? Nobody fact-checks Internet material (as all us Slashdot types have learned so many times).
* I don't know too many people who count using AIM, P2P clients and warez as a valid educational use of laptops. All of which became pandemic on our network within about three days of rolling out the laptops. Meanwhile, the kids who actually had a use for the machines couldn't because our servers crashed at least once a day as a result of the torrent of viruses, spam, etc being pumped out of hundreds of compromised laptops.
Coffee enthusiasts will also tell you that any brew temperature under 200 F/93 C is unacceptable for the same reasons you outlined for tea, although you should never consume coffee (or any other hot beverage, for that matter) at a temperature above 140 F/60 C.
Personally, I'm waiting until they can pack a soldier into an armored beach ball and roll him/her into the terrorists' hideouts...
"Blindsight" and its companion state, the Riddoch phenomenon, more properly refers to the ability of a brain that's lost most or all of its conscious input from some sensory function (vision, hearing, etc) to continue to subconsciously process the same information in lower-order processing centers. Using the example of a patient who's blind from an occipital lobe injury but still has functional eyeballs, the patient is consciously aware of being blind and sees nothing (NLP blindness) on a formal vision exam, yet manages to avoid moving objects (Riddoch) and can negotiate an unfamiliar room (blindsight), all at a much better rate than chance would predict. Although no visual processing is being executed in the occipital cortex, there's still activity occurring in the lateral geniculate nuclei (low-order edge tracing, motion tracking, etc), and that information contributes to an unconscious "view" of the patient's environment.
IANA- disclaimer: I hold no advanced degrees in neuroscience, but I do have my undergraduate degree in the field (B.S. biological psych/cognitive neuroscience,) and I did a lot of volunteering with visually impaired patients in high school and college. (I wanted to be either an ophthalmologist or a neurologist back then. The field still fascinates me, although I've since put the pursuit of an MD on long-term hiatus.)
Meanwhile, my dad's office ran all Windows 95 machines until about a month ago, and one machine in the set had to be run in straight MS-DOS 6.2 (?!?) in order to run the hospital's surgical scheduling software, which will not tolerate any form of emulation whatsoever. They're slightly better off now, with four XP machines and a Linux server, but they still have to keep that one DOS box until the hospital upgrades, which will probably be around the 37th of Janunever. To add insult to injury, the other surgeon in his practice pitched a fit about the expense of new computers, and he only agreed to upgrade under the condition that half the bill (it was about $7,000 total) come out of Dad's pocket. The two of them, and by extension nearly all the physicians and surgeons I know, will spare no expense for better patient care (learning new procedures, etc), but they see IT as a poor investment at best and a waste of money in most cases.
I also wouldn't worry about missing truly urgent calls in one of these theatres. Just have patrons do what on-call physicians and surgeons have been doing for decades: check their phones/pagers with the theatre manager when they arrive, and the manager sends someone to fetch them if the device goes off. The real emergencies can be handled quickly, and everyone gets to enjoy an uninterrupted show.
I have a pair of Bose QC2s, and while they work wonders on cabin noise, they don't filter out voices nearly as well. (Probably this is a safety feature.) I'm much more fond of in-ear monitor type headphones - souped-up earbuds that seal themselves in your ears with a pair of foam or silicone tips. Brilliant sound quality and 20+ dB noise reduction across all frequencies... what's not to like?
Eh, you shouldn't really worry unless you notice your flight attendant running around with a pocketbook full of Post-It notes...
My old high school, in a lot of ways, was the "beta" for HTH. In 1998, one of our leading alumni, a guy by the name of Steve Ballmer, came to the headmaster and the board of trustees with a proposition. Every teacher and student in the Middle School and Upper School - a swatch of kids from Grades 6-12 - would be issued their very own Dell laptop with Win2K, MS Office, and a whole suite of learning software. Both school buildings would be upgraded to 100 Mbit Ethernet in all rooms with new servers to run it all, and our humble little prep school was going to usher in a great new era of educational wizardry, where all your books would come on CD, teachers would work from Powerpoint, classes would interact on digital whiteboards, homework would be submitted electronically, everything from grades to cafeteria menus would be available on the school Intranet, and so on.
Suffice to say it didn't quite work out as planned.
I volunteered as a helpdesk tech during the first school year of the "Knowledge Technologies" program, 1999-2000, and it was a mess from start to finish. I saw every machine in the school at least once for any combination of system formatting/re-imaging and hardware repair/replacement - from screens to hard drives, you name it, some kid broke it, and usually more than once. Fully half the students' computers and 75% of the teachers' were infected with viruses and spyware at any given time. Since all but a handful of the teachers (who were brilliant with pens, paper and chalk, mind you) were technologically incompetent, most kids goofed off in class reading various message boards, downloading music/movies/warez, or looking at porn. Oh, and all that shiny happy PR stuff about textbooks on CD and digital cooperative lectures? Vaporware.
I went back for an alumni event last year. They're still stumbling along with the laptop program, only now the network is 802.11g and the operating system is XP. They still don't have digital textbooks, and the equipment still chokes and dies on a regular basis. Kids still have to print off their homework and hand it in the old-fashioned way. And they're not one iota more technologically able, on average, than we were in 1998.