Pretty much all the above, which is why I'm able to sit in my office during lunch break and read slash dot, instead of being stuck at home taking care of a household full time as well as a child neither my husband and I wanted. My fridge is keeping my food cold, a roomba is keeping the floor clean , and hormones are keeping me perpetually not-pregnant.

That frees me up to have a career of my own.

I'd add clean running municipal water as the most disruptive technology of the century before that, but still the most essential one today. We had a water main break last night and productivity inside and outside of the home died completely. Restaurants closed. Nobody could do laundry. We had to melt ice from our fridge (!!!) to have water to drink. Three hours later the water was restored, but we're still under "boil alert" until further notice.

I happily plonked down $60 to go to a Distance Worlds (Final Fantasy) concert. The house was sold out that night.

Some of the arrangements of the FF tracks have been outstanding for orchestra and/or rock band, however. The main theme to FF VII as played by orchestra is just as dramatic as any symphonic tome poem from the 19th century. Uematsu's take on a Carl Orff style choral piece worked well in VII, VIII, and XI. The music for Final Fantasy Tactics was scored as if it was for orchestra, and then they reprogrammed the PS1 synthesizer to actually be able to play it. (That body of work would do well to be re-arranged into a suite of 4-8 pf the best pieces, because the individual scenes do repeat a lot.)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I started programming in BASIC when I was 12 or so. The biggest problem for me was access to a computer - we didn't get one at home until I was 17, so anything I did was either at school or a computer lab outside of school. Access isn't an issue for most kids today, where toddlers get Leap pads and the smart ones will start tinkering with them by the time they're 7-8.

Oh sure, we were calculating velocity and acceleration and angles, but we were putting it to practical use with a Hot Wheels car on tracks set to angles to make them fly through a target. It was tons of math but also lots of giggling 17-year olds playing with cars like they haven't done in ten years.

During another unit, we calculated our own personal horsepower by running up the stairs.

They apologized for 1.0 because it was bad. But 2.0 was pretty good, and the new expansion (dubbed 3.0) is so crammed with fan service that we decided that they're never going to remake 1-6, they're just going to put all the contents of those games into XIV and call it done.

Their new DX11 client launched without a hitch, though - some people's FPS went up even as their GPU usage went down, and the graphics are a bit prettier.

Most of the people demanding a Mac native client were already playing the game - they just wanted something that they could play and also alt-tab out to surf the web and check email and crap the way the Windows people do.

Husband is currently grading final papers for college classes. He slaps them into software that detects plagiarism, then another software that picks out vocabulary level, typos, etc, and assigns a grammar score. Only then does he read it, quickly skimming over it and seeing whether there are citations on the "plagiarized" parts, if there are any, and whether he agrees with the AI score. Nine times out of ten, he does, and he uses the grammar score assigned by the AI. If someone plagiarized whole paragraphs without citations, they get an incomplete and need to do a rewrite. If someone didn't write the required number of words or pages, they get points knocked off the grammar score. It's faster than manually marking 150 papers, but still takes him about 15-20 hours of labor over the course of 2-3 days.

This only applies to chimps and doesn't affect the real workhorses of the lab, like rats and rhesus monkeys.

Army hospitals too. My father worked in the records department of a 13 story giant Army medical center in the '80s and '90s. While the records themselves were fat paper folders, much of the patient information was kept in a database (which I think by the '90s was an AS/400) - and part of the job of the record keepers was to take the new information from the doctors and update the patient files in the database. So while the historical record was all on paper, the most up to date stuff was in the database where it belonged. They had about 30 people doing this kind of data entry full time for a hospital of 100 doctors.

The philosophy works under the assumption that everyone in business is a decent human being. That is patently untrue. While some savvy businessmen are also great guys, most successful businessmen are cuthroat heartless bastards that would sell their grandma for another 2% profit margin boost to the bottom line.

Which is silly because ISPs should be doing that anyway, unless you're specifically paying for a separate VoIP service. That is classified as telephone traffic and prioritized for quality of service as a result.

Funny, I got all those things in my middle school and high school classes. The difference was I actually paid attention in class. Daily aerobics and later ballet in high school? Check. Balanced lunches, even if they were overcooked? Check. Balancing a checkbook? That was 7th grade math class. Check. Basic child raising skills? 12th grade anatomy class. We carried around bags of sugar for six weeks, kept a "feeding" journal, and would fail if our bag of sugar had tears or leaks at the end (child abuse!). Politics? 9th grade civics class, 10th grade economics class. About the only thing missing was "protecting the environment" - that was sort of included but not explicitly taught. So maybe in biology class?

If even one person running an application calls tech support and says, "I just got a database error, do you want a screen shot?" instead of "My computer broke and my screen went blank, can you come fix it?" it'll have done its job.

Never underestimate the capacity for 12 human beings to get confused about language and spend 20 minutes discussion exactly what a "public place" means and why it's different from a private place.