I think the best is when a room full of university students taking an exam abruptly find themselves sitting in the dark when the lights time out. Since no one knows where the motion sensor is to wave at it, you find everyone including the professor wildly flailing their arms around for a moment.

They even screwed all of us on the meals.
While the officers of the court dined on surf and turf on their expense accounts were were lied to and told no money was available for us.

When I served on a trial jury, the judge attended some committee meeting at the prison over our lunch break. Besides working through his lunch, he ate what the inmates ate.

It's in section 2.3, where he shows that e^(i tau) = 1.

Was it tl;dr? I'm not even average at maths compared to most /. posters, and even I could read the whole thing.

As an avid iPad user, I think I agree with your assessment. I was given mine and it took me about 4 months to figure out what it was for. But now that I have, I don't want to go back to life without it. It beats the hell out of a laptop in a lot of situations. (However, it cannot replace my laptop entirely.)

I'm convinced that the human brain is more neuroplastic than that. Like when they make test subjects wear glasses that flip everything upside-down. Disorienting at first, but their brains adjust to it and perceive it as normal eventually.

The question is whether it's worth the neurological effort to adapt to paradoxical focal and convergence distances for two hours then have to switch back. It seems to take some people longer than others to make that switch, some people get disoriented switching back, and some cannot seem to make the switch at all in that amount of time.

What disappoints me is that these are consumption-only devices -- No User-Serviceable Parts Inside. This won't help students learn how computers work or how to write software.

This is exactly what I was thinking. This is miles away from, say, Maine's laptop program. I've seen what those kids are doing with their laptops. You give kids a powerful tool and you get amazing products from them. Sadly, people are going to be impressed by what these kids do with these tablets, not even realizing that they've been hobbled by the limitations of the platform.
I like my iPad for certain specific tasks, but "powerful tool" it isn't.

I really don't understand why "Settlers of Catan" hasn't caught on more in the U.S.

What does "caught on" look like? Every tabletop gamer I know has a copy. Settlers of Catan is as hot a game as you're going to find in the U.S. The ceiling on Settlers of Catan is that most people don't play board games.

There are a lot of non-gamers who own a Monopoly, but they don't play it much. With the right marketing push, you might be able to get some of those people to buy a Settlers and stick it in the closet unused with their similarly-unused Monopoly board, but for the fact that it costs almost $40. Milton Bradley/Parker Bros. games can be had for under $20.

This really is the same issue with $1 phone games vs. $50 DS and PSP games. Lots of casuals who have low demands, but high numbers vs. the few connoisseurs who will pay for something they actually use and enjoy with more intensity.

I'll bet there would be a lot more hairy-nosed wombats in the ecosystem if I could have one for breakfast.

Because being edible totally saved the passenger pigeon.

Not to mention that the most important thing that will save pandas-- habitat preservation-- is the very thing that will protect many other species, as well as serving a positive benefit to humans (habitat provides a carbon sink, erosion and flood prevention, groundwater filtration, etc. or even just as land reserved for future generations to exploit). Protecting pandas has a lot of positive collateral effects.

crap, I meant "DON'T need to be an engineer to be a ship's engineer." I previewed it and everything and still missed it.

I think they use the word "engineer" in the nautical sense rather than the academic degree sense. You need to be an engineer to be a "ship's engineer". I think traditional nautical terminology predates academic titles like yours, so there's not much you can do about it.
On ST, when things are going normally, they are simply operators of equipment that others have constructed. When things go weird, Geordi did have to redesign things. I don't know how many others on his team had the skills to do that. (Besides O'Brien and Barclay, they were all just redshirts who happened to wear yellow, so it's hard to say).

Yes! This, exactly. Once I was done taking classes it turned into a horrendous grind.

Are you nuts? Have you ever been to grad school? I worked in my field before going back to get a PhD and I found my normal job to be way better.
Research and academia may be insular, but it's plenty "real."

Speaking of "hunched over a desk." I have a friend who did get a job outside of academia doing biomed research. She left that job and went on disability from the abysmal ergonomics at her lab. I think she's a manager of the print shop at Staples now.

... The real issue I saw with the biology program is that you were unable to publish or graduate with a null result. You do a valid experiment, which could have shown something, but it turns out biology simply doesn't work that way, and so your experiment simply confirms what is currently known and shows nothing particularly new (but done in a new way, so it could have.) Sorry, you don't graduate...

Wow! That's awful. Bad for the students and bad for the field in general. How much wasted effort happens in disparate labs with people retrying things that someone else already learned isn't right, but left the data in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet?
My advisor actually had me go looking for "bottom drawer" experiments when I did my first lit review (fortunately, my specialty is narrow enough that I can pretty much call everyone who is likely to have ever done that work in an afternoon). And she explicitly told me I didn't need a positive finding on my dissertation to defend it successfully.