When I was a HS senior way back in 1999-2000, my school became one of the first in the nation to require laptops for all students in Grades 6-12. Each student was "issued" (read: their parents had to cough up an additional $2500 for) a new Dell Latitude laptop with all the bells and whistles and Microsoft everything (no surprise, given that Steve Ballmer is one of our alumni). Supposedly, all our books were going to come on CDROM, all our classes were going to be models of networked interaction between students and faculty, and the laptops were going to usher in a new era of interactive, advanced learning.
The first year was an unmitigated disaster. I spent my study hall and my lunch hour every day working as a helpdesk tech, and we averaged thirty kids an hour with dying and dead machines, all suffering from malfunctions, viruses and just plain abuse. When people weren't loading their machines full of music/movies/warez/porn, they were playing games and IMing each other in class. This contributed to all sorts of network problems, which exacerbated the problems the machines already had. (Did I mention that the Microsoft "Knowledge Technologies" package had more bugs than the AP Biology fruit-fly lab?) Moreover, you couldn't use the laptops for any of the programming, advanced graphic design or publishing software we used, for which having a laptop might actually have been useful - that stuff was all Apple-based, and restricted by hardware dongles to boot. Finally, since 90% of the teachers were technologically incompetent themselves, they had no idea how to use the machines in class. I can count on one hand the number of kids who actually used the machines for anything useful during class time, and that counts myself. (Five classes out of six, my laptop sat in its bag and I took notes on paper.)
The program is still in operation, and it's still useless as ever. Nowadays, they added two new functionalities to the machines, digital whiteboards and computerized attendance. The latter program takes class attendance using a map of IPs and locations, which any enterprising geek can rig by using a static IP.
I can't fault the program completely, though. I had a great laptop when I went to college. I just found it completely, utterly useless in high school.
Another major part of why Sony so frequently falls on its face is their attitude toward licensing.
Time after time, Sony has come up with new technologies and media formats that have been decent to outstanding, and then they turn right around and shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to let anyone else incorporate those technologies into their own products. Their attitude seems to be that by enforcing exclusivity on Sony tech/formats, they'll have a lock on a market-dominating product (cue evil laughter). What actually winds up happening is that you can only find Sony formats on Sony products, which only a handful of people buy because they're expensive as freak-all and/or poorly made and/or suffer from lack of good content. Meanwhile, tech/formats of lesser quality achieve market dominance because they're licensed to everyone under the sun and you can buy a player and a handful of titles for very little outlay. The tech/format fails along with the product, and everyone laughs up their sleeves at "those retards at Sony" who can't seem to understand how the "real world" works.
I'm a casual gamer at best, so as far as I'm concerned, the Wii-ing contest between the consoles is a peripheral issue. However, given Sony's track record, I don't expect great things out of Blu-Ray, the PS3, or really anything else they're slated to make, and I hate investing large sums in products only to have to repeat my investment with another format/platform. For that reason alone, I'll be staying far, far away from Sony for the foreseeable future.
Even leaving aside the general squeamishness that goes with eating cultured muscle (you can't really call it meat), you also have to consider the sources. In order to grow muscle tissue, whether it's on an animal or in a petri dish, you need large inputs of amino acids, either as such or in the form of proteins. And where do we suppose all this protein is going to come from? Hint: it probably won't be soybeans. All you've really done is add an extra link and a lot of expense and complexity to what was already a compromised, fragile food chain.
You may not even be avoiding the risk of prion diseases by eating this stuff. If the "input" protein source was contaminated, the culture will be too, and I don't expect they'll be sourcing high-quality sterile protein for this stuff. Hell, we don't make that much effort for human tissue allografts.
I figure you can look at this one of two ways: either you can run down the street screaming about Soylent Meat (tm), or you can just roll your eyes and say "makes for funny sci-fi, dismally unworkable in real life." Either way, I'll continue to take my steaks the old-fashioned way: off a cow that ate grass and wasn't shot full of steroids and antibiotics.
+1 to parent and grandparent. Pity I don't have mod points...
Our culture is the descendence of what Daniel Quinn calls Takers... a culture that has taken into its own hands the power to say who lives and who dies, to dictate the right way to live for everyone, everywhere, and that foolishly believes itself immune from the requirements of the natural world that we depend on for survival.
I see that someone else read Ishmael... we were subjected to that in high school as part of our summer program in "Moral Development." Great message, but I really could have done without the telepathic ape.
I'm not sure I like the Zero Suit Samus that will be in the new Super Smash Bros. game. It would really destroy the series to try to make Samus into more of a Lara Croft / DOA Girl type character.
Not only that, but the Zero Suit and its ilk (see also Metroid Prime 2's ending scenes) completely neglect what I believe is one of Samus' major strong points: she is not a teenager.
When games include female characters at all, the vast majority of those characters will be between the ages of 13 and 20, and impossibly smart, clever, athletic and otherwise endowed. Samus is very few of those things. Yes, she's reasonably good-looking and kicks massive quantities of alien ass, but she does it because it's her job, not because some magic artifact pulled her into a parallel world, or because she thought it'd be fun to climb into a power suit and waste a few dozen space pirates. Despite her occasionally questionable taste in undergarments (who knows - maybe the power suit works better with skin contact?), there's no mistaking Samus for anything but an adult. The character design, I think, reflects that, or at least it did until recently. Metroid Prime's version of Samus was the best example of that concept - at the end of the game, as she surveys the wreckage of Tallon IV, she looks tired and a little sad, and you can almost imagine her thinking, "God, I need a drink or five after dealing with THAT thing."
The version of Samus we see in Zero Mission and MP2 looks entirely too much like an anime chick-of-the-week for my taste, and I really hope that the designers of MP3 go back to the older character designs.
There's nothing new about parents clobbering their kids in video games. My mom beat Metroid two months before I did, not to mention Tetris and Dr. Mario, and she used to regularly flatten the neighborhood kids in Super Mario Kart.
Quite possibly the worst thing I ever did was get Mom a DS. Four words: Mario Kart competitive multiplayer. If I had any gaming pride left before, it's gone now.
That's always a fun prank to play on your fellow office drones. Over a period of a few weeks, slowly taper the blends in all the pots so they all contain decaf. Once everyone has been sufficiently weaned off the caffeine, abruptly switch back to the fully leaded stuff. Sit back and watch the fireworks.
I did this to myself as an experiment some years back - completely gave up caffeine for Lent (no coffee, tea, soft drinks, chocolate, Excedrin, etc), and then on Easter Sunday I went to the local coffee shop and had my usual, pre-experiment morning beverage - a dry quad-shot cappuccino.
Try having your father include his middle initial and/or name when ordering plane tickets next time. I used to have the same problem...
He's been flying under his full name since I started booking all his tickets for him three years ago. "John William Murphy, M.D." gets flagged just as often as "John Murphy" does.
Apparently that mad IRA gunman must have gone to medical school in his spare time...
To add insult to injury, if your name even remotely resembles the name of a known or suspected "evildoer," you get flagged. My entire family now suffers an extra 45 minutes of screening at the airport, every single time we fly, because my dad's name matches that of some IRA gunman who was last active in the early 80's. (Before you go thinking this might be a valid concern, consider that we're talking about an extremely common name. "John Murphy" isn't exactly "Zaccarias Moussaoui.")
And of course, all this color-coded rigmarole does not make us one bit safer, just more vulnerable to the constant fear-mongering coming out of Washington.
Back to retinas and dogs: I've found that if I shine a flashlight toward my OWN eye, but at an angle where I don't see the bright point of the lightbulb, and peer into the dog's eye from as close as I can get, I can get a good view of the dog's retina -- sufficient to see fine detail. A Rube-Goldberg version of a biomicroscope.:)
Which is pretty much the way an indirect ophthalmoscope works, except with an indirect, you also use a 20D aspheric lens. That system gives you a much wider field of view than your naked eye or the traditional handheld direct ophthalmoscope. Of course, an indirect costs a bundle and you're only apt to find one in a hospital or an ophthalmologist's office, but still.:)
Minivans make great people haulers or stuff haulers, but generally not both simultaneously.
When I was a kid, we carpooled to school (which was 17 miles away), and Mom had a 1986 Mercury Grand Marquis station wagon. She could load eight kids PLUS their associated backpacks, musical instruments, science fair projects and Girl Scout cookies in that thing. Grant you, it got maybe 20 MPG on a good day, but I have yet to see that old beast beat for cargo capacity.
Many people in my area (SE Michigan) say they drive SUVs because they "can't get through the snow with anything else". I currently drive a station wagon with AWD, and I can get through snow that makes the neighbor's Hummer H2 choke and die. Plus, I get 3x the gas mileage and I can STILL haul more stuff than him.
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The first year was an unmitigated disaster. I spent my study hall and my lunch hour every day working as a helpdesk tech, and we averaged thirty kids an hour with dying and dead machines, all suffering from malfunctions, viruses and just plain abuse. When people weren't loading their machines full of music/movies/warez/porn, they were playing games and IMing each other in class. This contributed to all sorts of network problems, which exacerbated the problems the machines already had. (Did I mention that the Microsoft "Knowledge Technologies" package had more bugs than the AP Biology fruit-fly lab?) Moreover, you couldn't use the laptops for any of the programming, advanced graphic design or publishing software we used, for which having a laptop might actually have been useful - that stuff was all Apple-based, and restricted by hardware dongles to boot. Finally, since 90% of the teachers were technologically incompetent themselves, they had no idea how to use the machines in class. I can count on one hand the number of kids who actually used the machines for anything useful during class time, and that counts myself. (Five classes out of six, my laptop sat in its bag and I took notes on paper.)
The program is still in operation, and it's still useless as ever. Nowadays, they added two new functionalities to the machines, digital whiteboards and computerized attendance. The latter program takes class attendance using a map of IPs and locations, which any enterprising geek can rig by using a static IP.
I can't fault the program completely, though. I had a great laptop when I went to college. I just found it completely, utterly useless in high school.
Time after time, Sony has come up with new technologies and media formats that have been decent to outstanding, and then they turn right around and shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to let anyone else incorporate those technologies into their own products. Their attitude seems to be that by enforcing exclusivity on Sony tech/formats, they'll have a lock on a market-dominating product (cue evil laughter). What actually winds up happening is that you can only find Sony formats on Sony products, which only a handful of people buy because they're expensive as freak-all and/or poorly made and/or suffer from lack of good content. Meanwhile, tech/formats of lesser quality achieve market dominance because they're licensed to everyone under the sun and you can buy a player and a handful of titles for very little outlay. The tech/format fails along with the product, and everyone laughs up their sleeves at "those retards at Sony" who can't seem to understand how the "real world" works.
I'm a casual gamer at best, so as far as I'm concerned, the Wii-ing contest between the consoles is a peripheral issue. However, given Sony's track record, I don't expect great things out of Blu-Ray, the PS3, or really anything else they're slated to make, and I hate investing large sums in products only to have to repeat my investment with another format/platform. For that reason alone, I'll be staying far, far away from Sony for the foreseeable future.
You may not even be avoiding the risk of prion diseases by eating this stuff. If the "input" protein source was contaminated, the culture will be too, and I don't expect they'll be sourcing high-quality sterile protein for this stuff. Hell, we don't make that much effort for human tissue allografts.
I figure you can look at this one of two ways: either you can run down the street screaming about Soylent Meat (tm), or you can just roll your eyes and say "makes for funny sci-fi, dismally unworkable in real life." Either way, I'll continue to take my steaks the old-fashioned way: off a cow that ate grass and wasn't shot full of steroids and antibiotics.
When games include female characters at all, the vast majority of those characters will be between the ages of 13 and 20, and impossibly smart, clever, athletic and otherwise endowed. Samus is very few of those things. Yes, she's reasonably good-looking and kicks massive quantities of alien ass, but she does it because it's her job, not because some magic artifact pulled her into a parallel world, or because she thought it'd be fun to climb into a power suit and waste a few dozen space pirates. Despite her occasionally questionable taste in undergarments (who knows - maybe the power suit works better with skin contact?), there's no mistaking Samus for anything but an adult. The character design, I think, reflects that, or at least it did until recently. Metroid Prime's version of Samus was the best example of that concept - at the end of the game, as she surveys the wreckage of Tallon IV, she looks tired and a little sad, and you can almost imagine her thinking, "God, I need a drink or five after dealing with THAT thing."
The version of Samus we see in Zero Mission and MP2 looks entirely too much like an anime chick-of-the-week for my taste, and I really hope that the designers of MP3 go back to the older character designs.
See http://thisischris.com/feature/2005/samus.html for a pictorial progression.
Quite possibly the worst thing I ever did was get Mom a DS. Four words: Mario Kart competitive multiplayer. If I had any gaming pride left before, it's gone now.
I did this to myself as an experiment some years back - completely gave up caffeine for Lent (no coffee, tea, soft drinks, chocolate, Excedrin, etc), and then on Easter Sunday I went to the local coffee shop and had my usual, pre-experiment morning beverage - a dry quad-shot cappuccino.
The results were interesting, to say the least.
He's been flying under his full name since I started booking all his tickets for him three years ago. "John William Murphy, M.D." gets flagged just as often as "John Murphy" does.
Apparently that mad IRA gunman must have gone to medical school in his spare time...
To add insult to injury, if your name even remotely resembles the name of a known or suspected "evildoer," you get flagged. My entire family now suffers an extra 45 minutes of screening at the airport, every single time we fly, because my dad's name matches that of some IRA gunman who was last active in the early 80's. (Before you go thinking this might be a valid concern, consider that we're talking about an extremely common name. "John Murphy" isn't exactly "Zaccarias Moussaoui.") And of course, all this color-coded rigmarole does not make us one bit safer, just more vulnerable to the constant fear-mongering coming out of Washington.
Which is pretty much the way an indirect ophthalmoscope works, except with an indirect, you also use a 20D aspheric lens. That system gives you a much wider field of view than your naked eye or the traditional handheld direct ophthalmoscope. Of course, an indirect costs a bundle and you're only apt to find one in a hospital or an ophthalmologist's office, but still. :)
Minivans make great people haulers or stuff haulers, but generally not both simultaneously. When I was a kid, we carpooled to school (which was 17 miles away), and Mom had a 1986 Mercury Grand Marquis station wagon. She could load eight kids PLUS their associated backpacks, musical instruments, science fair projects and Girl Scout cookies in that thing. Grant you, it got maybe 20 MPG on a good day, but I have yet to see that old beast beat for cargo capacity. Many people in my area (SE Michigan) say they drive SUVs because they "can't get through the snow with anything else". I currently drive a station wagon with AWD, and I can get through snow that makes the neighbor's Hummer H2 choke and die. Plus, I get 3x the gas mileage and I can STILL haul more stuff than him.