Since when were we talking about sales?

Oh, sorry, *sales*?

His criticism is all about why he doesn't want to own a Wii. It's also why I'm not interested. I don't care if there's one in every home in the world. It's still a weak gaming platform with a gimmicky controller and a limited library of games which mostly feature childish cartoon artwork. No thank you.

The part where we are a democratic country full of stuffy neo-puritans.

Statistically, a majority of Americans have tried pot.
Also, a majority of Americans are opposed to legalization.

Which means there are a significant number of assholes in this country who think it's perfectly fine if they use pot and get away with it, but YOU should go to jail if you get caught doing the same thing.

Most libertarian crackpots like me are painfully aware that "live and let live" is not actually a majority philosophy, and we've got an uphill battle to sell our political views to the rest of society.

It probably would have been possible for you to make the case for the utility of such a device without resorting to personal attacks. You had some good points wedge in there between the cheap shots.

You apparently cared enough to reply. Just not enough to explain.

You can just come out and say that you want it for porn. It's okay.

Perhaps not, but I find it hard to fathom why anybody would want a 7-inch tablet from ANY company.

There are situations where I don't mind carrying a book-sized gadget around. In those situations, a small laptop is FAR superior in almost every way.

There are situations where I would rather not carry a book-sized gadget around. In those situations, an iPhone or Blackberry slips in your pocket and can do pretty much everything a tablet can do (and then some).

Tablets & eBooks are neither fish nor foul. Too big for a pocket or purse, but very limited compared to laptops or even netbooks.

I don't think anyone willingly uses Windows ME for any useful task anymore.

Were they ever able to? ;)

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.

I stand corrected. For some reason, I was thinking of wipes rather than dissolves. Still, the challenges to 3D rendering remain for both methods.

"Real 3D"? No, but you could probably fake it pretty well, given enough resources. You just need to compose "blank" backgrounds using (more or less) the same sort of trickery that the Fark Photoshop contest geeks use, then mat out the "objects" you want to have appear closer, and decide how much closer you want to place them.

A "fade" is a technique in TV and film for changing from one scene to another. The simplest (and laziest) is a "jump cut", in which the image one your screen abruptly changes. Sometimes a fade is done by juxtaposing objects of similar geometry (i.e., pan the camera to a woman's circular parasol, cut to a shot of the sun in the same position on the screen, then pan down to the scene below.) Another option is to fade to black and then fade in the next scene (Tarantino has been doing that for his chapter breaks, and a lot of TV shows, such as LOST, like to fade from black coming out of commercials.)

A "crossfade" or "wipe", is when the image of the next scene is "wiped" over the previous one, like somebody sliding one painting in front of another. George Lucas used them A LOT when making the Star Wars movies.

The problem that Dr. Manhattan was talking about is, when you do a crossfade, you briefly have two images on the screen at once, which really messes up the stereoscopic 3D effect. For that reason, re-mastering a movie like Star Wars to be a 3D feature would be nearly impossible without major edits. If fact, you'd probably need to go back to the original raw footage and re-cut the entire movie.

Many conventional DVDs also possess this "feature."

I have a 119" projection system, but my reluctance to adopt Blu-Ray has everything to do with the fact that I find little plastic disks inconvenient. What few movies I buy, I rip to a computer hard drive (using HandBrake), and everything else is either downloaded or streamed. Blu-Ray rips take up A LOT more space.

The result of this is that almost nothing I watch is in full 1080p or even 1080i. The stuff I download or stream is typically 720p, at best, and my DVD rips are usually 480p (anamorphic)... and I don't care.

It still looks damn good, and I've yet to have somebody visit and ask me "why is the resolution so low?" while watching a movie on my system.

A call-center job, no matter how fun and rewarding it might be, is still an entry-level position. When most of your workforce is already planning on being somewhere else in a few years while you are training them in, a 45% turnover rate is OUTSTANDING.

If you're still holding the exact same position at the exact same company which you took right after graduation, that's not an "entry-level" job, but a "dead-end" job.

A call center is where you work while you take night classes in network administration, computer programming, or towards your MBA, which will prep you for whatever your REAL career will be. Nobody dreams about growing up to deal with angry customers for a living until retirement, unless you mean "deal with" them in the mafia sense of the word.