I think the parent knew that, they was just trying to explain things in terms that would make sense to someone who thinks an old phone would make a wonderful hobbyist computing platform.

Hold on, let me go grab my box of expired Slashdot memes, I think there's one in here for... ahh, here we go. Ahem.

Whoooosh!

I was really interested in Google Wave. Got in the Beta, posted in some random thread... and that was it. No-one I knew signed up. Because no-one they knew was signing up. So I couldn't actually make use of it, at all. It was also really tricky explaining to people what exactly it was; I just couldn't come up with a nice, understandable metaphor to describe it, and I'm not sure Google could either.

Umm, as I said above...

So, yeah, I know.

Back in the day, my friends and I were really in to Battlefield 2. As time went on though, I found I just couldn't play; we'd spend 20 minutes trying to find a server with enough slots, and after I joined I'd only be there a few minutes before Punkbuster crashes and I get booted from the game. And I'm being precise there; Punkbuster wasn't identifying me as doing anything wrong (because I wasn't), it would just constantly crash out. We tried a few servers not using punkbuster, and everything was fine. I tried looking for solutions online, uninstalling and reinstalling etc, no go.

It got to the point where we'd meet up time and again to try and play, spend a few hours "playing" BF2, and I'd get maybe half an hour of actual gameplay. We moved onto BF2142; even worse. Updates and patches exacerbated things. Everyone else preferred BF2 and moved back to it. It was now essentially unplayable. When everyone else moved to BF3, I didn't follow.

Just my experience I know, but a damn bad one.

Ummm... yes. Yes, I did. Glad you're keeping up.

No, it's really, really, really not. You can't revert a death.

Umm, that's not a Playstation controller, or at least not an official first-party one. Give how many PC controllers have used that style, it's more likely just some generic PC controller.

What a brilliant idea; I completely agree! But... how to make it happen? I mean, this is just two people on Slashdot, we can't do much.

Maybe, and bear with me here, maybe we could get other people to join in. We could all push together for these rights. Not just people we know or are in contact with though, that wouldn't be enough. We'd need a whole organisation, country (or even world) wide. People could join to have a say in our policies and how we apply pressure to get our aims! (For a small cost, of course... I don't know about you, but I certainly don't have the resources to run something like this for free.)

With enough people on board, all demanding the same thing, we could truly be heard! Some employers may not wish people to join, but we could offer our resources to protect people, ensure that they are free to be represented, protected from mistreatment, and that when we are able to get these laws changed, that the new systems we fought for are actually followed.

If only there was some kind of system for uniting people in this way... Alas, it's just a pipedream.

The two tasks aren't mutually exclusive. There is a logical fallacy in thinking that scientists can be taken as one entire group who should all focus research on a handful of "important things". The people with the expertise of how we could theoretically travel to other planets and make that habital environments in a millenium (30 generations?) are not, for the most part, the same people with the expertise of how best to steer society on a global scale to make best use of this planet over the next century (3 generations), and I daresay if each group focuses on their area of expertise, they'll both make advances that aid the other along the way.

But recording at "better than human hearing" isn't enough, because as those sounds are altered, processed, mixed, overlaid and resampled over and over and over again, you lose fidelity. You don't need your original recordings to be good enough for human ears, you need them to be good enough for mixing boards and DSPs and all kinds of hardware, after dozens (hundreds?) of changes. You need the end product to be good enough for ears.

(And to nip the obvious counter-argument in the bud; obviously the genre of music and recording method are important here, and if there're not many steps between what's being recorded and what's being sold then, sure, it's not such a big issue.)

She also has a youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/clairelom) with some videos of in in motion. One of these says it's blocked by a TV channel that own the copyright, hmm....

The Snowman was very clearly referring to ingredients which are generally considered inert enough for used in placebos, but in a small majority of cases can have a direct, unintended physical effect. In a world where a small number of people are allergic to water, I challenge you to find any substance you could introduce to absolutely any human that's guaranteed to be truly "inert".

I'm not sure whether you're talking about cars or computers now, but the answer's the same either way; it's depends on the driver.