Most current cancer treatments already cost as much or more than the equivalent weights of precious metals. My mom's IV stuff alone was over $24,000 per bag, and there were a lot of bags. And anything that keeps the incredibly toxic substances away from your body is a plus. The chemo stuff is seriously harsh on people.

+1. I think the girls figure they can get away with it since the guys police themselves mostly for the girls' benefit anyway. Maybe they're trying to impress the guys with their obscene vocabulary? But whatever the reason, I've almost always found this to be true.

After taking an animation class in film school, I will never consider animated features "cheap." There's a lot of work involved, and trained animators' time isn't free, either. If you're doing it all yourself in your spare time, then it's just the cost of the computer and the program you use. But that's not exactly the same thing as a full production.

Yeah, I wondered about that, too. But after a bit of thought I realized that the pros need to complain now, and loudly enough to get changes made. This is Apple's product going forward, and if we want any part of it we need to tell them before we're shut out. I certainly won't be switching to FCP X any time soon, and I doubt any even semi-pro editor will be. But if we want something that will work on our next computers, or even to properly leverage our current ones, or if we want software updates to keep our codecs and export formats up-to-date, or any of the useful traits of current-release software, we need to be sure that we can use FCP X. Right now, we can't. That's OK; real professionals are used to waiting on software updates and rarely get to use 1.0 software because it has bugs and incompatibilities and all sorts of problems that are fine for consumers but not fine for clients. We use it on test machines if we have the luxury and tell manufacturers where it isn't working and then we usually get to deploy 1.01 or 1.03 to the trenches. This explosion is exactly what we should expect, given that no one can buy FCS3 any more. If Apple was more open and had let pro users beta test it, we'd be a lot less vocal - no one gets that mad about Avid's bugs because they have a relatively open process for dealing with them. No one got excited over FCS3 bugs, either. It's more Apple's style of reveal, "Hey, this is all you can buy now! It's professional, since it says it in the name! Isn't it awesome?" that gets the high-end users worked up.

Totally the Fischertechnik. It was fun to say, fun to build with, and remarkably precise. I learned a lot of my engineering skills from building robots and gadgets with Fischertechnik.