I'm young (recently 30) and have great vision, yet I just recently discovered, thanks to a Kindle, that smaller font sizes make me sleepy. When I'm reading something, on a computer, book, kindle, whatever, if the font is small and I'm a bit tired, it takes a little more concentration to read the tiny font -- which subsequently tires my eyes out. With a comfortable font size, I can read for hours without feeling the least bit drowsy.

And I don't think it has anything to do with screen size, either, as I've read whole novels on my iPhone -- with a reasonable font size, of course. But it wasn't until I had a device that let me simply change the size of the font instantly that I even noticed the issue. Now it makes me think differently about older people reading; I think my drowsy grandparents, who tear through paperbacks yet often fall asleep reading them, aren't actually just "old and tired" -- I think they simply go through the same thing my young eyes do.

But to corroborate your main point, my parents love using their iMac and my grandparents recently got a "hand me up" laptop that they use for games and other stuff. In both cases, they just had to get over the "will I break it?" factor, and then they were zooming like any other human when confronted with an interesting object ;D

I rent books from the library. Some even offer e-books. I get to read the books and then give it back after a few weeks; it's great! You should see if one's been set up in your area!

Even if DRM protection is not easy to remove, I find it hard to believe that if one of these companies suddenly went bankrupt, their assets wouldn't be purchased by a competitor. What's more, if they suddenly disappeared overnight, then there would be no one to update their DRM format -- giving hackers a stable target. Arguably, once the company disappears it would be easier to bypass their DRM, as there'd be no legal team to send out C&D letters to hackers.

It's always there, and takes up no space, but sharing is an important factor in buying a book for many people. I just had a friend ask me for some suggested reading, and a couple of the books were e-books with DRM. If it was a paper book, I could've loaned it to him.

It's not terrible, but it's an example of how DRM is more of a nuisance for those being "good consumers" than any actual protection for copyright holders. Instead, my friend just got the books from the library.

And even those web sensations might be limited. Look how hard Google has been trying to get into more social networking -- Orkut is dead (except in Brazil), Buzz is lame -- and even they have a hard time of it, despite being massively popular in other avenues.

I agree with your assessment of Microsoft, but Nintendo's press conference is just a repeat of old franchises and sequelitis. These are the same games we've been playing for years, with marginal increases or minor changes to the gameplay. Most don't even have a new story (if they have a story at all). Any hype or excitement for these new games can be addressed by just playing your current stable of games in these franchises and thinking "OK, imagine this level is slightly different, and there's a new item. Oh and the graphics are slightly better." Ta da!

Thing is, lime mortar hasn't really been used for about 150 years, so there's no research into it for modern building applications. Since OPC is better in every regard, including strength, repairing old lime mortar hasn't really been of concern until recently, when there's been more of a push to accurately repair historical buildings and structures. However, you're not exactly right with the Great Wall -- it was built 2200 years ago, whereas TFA notes that this particular process was done 1500 years ago.

Still, I imagine this was also prevalent in Pre-Columbian architecture too, only with corn. Boil the corn, then use the leftover water.

We could, but it doesn't matter -- we don't use lime mortar anymore. We use portland cement.

This isn't concrete -- it's lime mortar (which isn't used anymore). This is just a very hard lime mortar due to the additives -- it doesn't give any strength comparisons to portland cement. I imagine it's significantly less strong, though, despite the headline. This is "super strong" compared to plain ol' lime mortar.

Search is faster for finding what you're searching for. It is not necessarily faster for finding actual information, which is what most people are doing when they are looking through a document. Search is like using a good index; it just tells you where the subject in question appears. You still need to check the context to see if it's the actual information you're looking for.

Exactly. Facebook has worked so well in part because it forces people to be less anonymous. You are prompted to use your real name and put in factual data about yourself, and when you becomes friends with other people it connects you via all of their other tools. So yes, you could become friends with people from high school you don't know, but your pictures will be with your actual friends, which really is showing that, in private, you hang out with certain people.

I don't see how a factual representation of the self is necessarily bad, though. Yes yes, there's the whole "if you're not breaking the law, why are you afraid of the law" argument, but Facebook does let you lock down your profile pretty well nowadays. The latest privacy hubbub is about how Facebook is linking into other sites like CNN.

MySpace was always a bad model for social networking as it was little more than GeoCities templates with a friend feature. Facebook is actually social networking. But like IM protocols, how many do you need? Sure there's going to be some people who really care about anonymity and prefer something like Diaspora (or ICQ). But the idea of " social network" and privacy/anonymity seems kind of at odds, doesn't it?

I agree -- in high school, technical schools were for "losers" and my high school tried to get them into the technical trade schools as fast as possible, often setting up deals so that they'd earn HS credits for their senior year. It was seen more as a "You're too dumb for college so you might as well do this other thing" rather than viable job training.

And yes, "NCLB" should really be named "All Children Trained to the Same Standard," to point out that it just sets a benchmark and makes all children meet that, regardless of individual talent -- let alone available jobs. Let alone jobs that would benefit the economy.

Well, ignoring the cost of the (apparently private) school you went to, since many public universities offer CS programs, should a CS program teach you the details of a language? Or should it teach you overall concepts about computer science? I mean, truly, you went for a Computer Science degree, not a Computer Programming degree (arguably that would be a cert, not a degree, and be cheaper and shorter as well).
I think the best programmers are those who are motivated to self-teach, because it shows that they really love programming. But I also think there is important stuff taught in computer science classes. It might not be for everyone, but I think it can turn people who just write code without thinking about what actually happens with what they write into better programmers.

Yeah, it's not exactly rocket science. We can't really help the original question when he says shit like "I really need to keep my swiss army knife on the keyring." No, you don't -- that can go in a bag or other thing. You need pocket keys for accessing things when you're not at home. Everything else can stay indoors. If you're a nerd, you should know that there's very easy ways to connect things together, keys and keyrings especially.

A really geeky way to do it is to simply create separate sets of keys. House key plus motorbike, or house key plus car plus girlfriend, etc. Take whichever is most applicable -- the only true standard would be the housekey. And if you own a place (or have a friendly landlord), look into getting your home locks keyed the same. I personally just have about 6 keys on a single ring attached to a lightweight carabiner. Not only is it small, but it clips on to my pants so it doesn't bulge around in a pocket (or scratch up my phone).

I believe one of the major differences between the "reboot" franchise and the old franchises is that they're not going to fix anything. They don't need to fix anything, after all -- there's plenty of stories and intrigue leaving the universe as it is. Getting everything back to zero is old sci-fi.