Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of wireless in this country. The iPhone 3G was the phone to own. Then the other guy came out with the HTC Hero. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the iPhone 3Gs. That's 3G speeds and a fucking compass. For orienteering. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards went to 4G. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling the 3G and a fucking compass. Orienteering or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to 5G.

If you watch TV or movies, you see this with virtually any subject you could imagine. What it boils down to is that generally the people making the content need to dumb down everything to what Joe Average expects to see. If you've got greater-than-average knowledge of any field, chances are when you see people doing it on TV they're fucking something up.

We've already heard countless examples of computer GUIs. How about medicine? I was a paramedic, and my wife is an ER doc, and both of us cringe every time we see someone onscreen get a giant needle stabbed into their chest. Ever since Uma got the treatment in Pulp Fiction (maybe there were earlier ones, but that's the first time I remember seeing it) this is a great little dramatic moment that they love to stick into films and TV shows. In real life drugs go into a vein and even if the heart isn't going you can circulate with a little CPR. Jamming giant needles into the heart is just silly.

And while we're on the subject, all the CPR I see onscreen is shit. The last time I was certified was 2005 so I might be out of date, but last I checked we were at 30:2 compression/breath ratio at a rate of about 100 compressions per minute. Our memory aid was that we could compress to the tune of Queen's 'Another One Bites the Dust' (funny, I know) and that would get us pretty close. On TV it's way too slow, not to mention pretty rare that 30 seconds of CPR will magically revive someone without the addition of a defibrillator and lots of drugs.

I don't know dick about car repair, but I know what to do if I'm in a movie. I ask the hot chick on the side of the road to pop the hood, I stick my head in there, jiggle a few wires, then say, "Try it now." Then it'll start right up. Or possibly blow up, depending on the movie. Oh, and if you need to hotwire a car, you just yank that bundle of wires out from under the dash and tap a couple of them together until it sparks.

How about firearms? Again, I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure when you shoot someone with a 9mm it won't knock them off their feet and throw their body 10 feet backwards through a plate glass window. But it sure looks nifty.

General electronics? It doesn't really matter what you're doing here; defusing a bomb, fixing a broken radio, breaking into a vault, etc. You just open up whatever device you're dealing with, connect a few jumpers with alligator clips on the end, clip another wire with a set of cutters and poof, you're golden. Just don't cut the green wire. Or was it the blue wire?

I'm sure most people could come up with similar things they see all the time, these are just a few of the ones that I notice. I probably gloss over lots more simply because for those subjects, I am the Joe Average and whatever they're doing looks totally plausible to me even though someone somewhere is gnashing their teeth over it.

I've been reading Slashdot for years, but I don't think I've posted less than half a dozen times, and think all of those were probably a single line.

Not only did I do something that pisses me off royally when I see other people do it (giant blocks of text with no whitespace), I compounded the idiocy by not using the 'Preview' button.

I'm really annoyed at myself, mainly because this was the first thing I'd read on Slashdot that I actually felt I had something which I could contribute, and then I went and screwed up the posting. I'm guessing a lot of people are like me, and when faced with a giant chunk of text, just skip it and go on to the next post.

Luckily I saved a copy in case the form conked out in mid-post, as has happened numerous times before. So if you skipped the first one, now you can save your retinas and read this properly formatted one.

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Did you know the company actually doesn't want you to call them Legos? I think they prefer something like 'Lego bricks'. They get all uppity when it comes to trademark names.

Anyway, I had a pretty good stash of Legos when I was younger. Currently my sister and I are both in our mid-thirties with two kids each, and our Legos were sitting alone in some boxes in our parent's basement. One day my dad decided that those Legos should be in the hands of his grandchildren, so he set to work.

He could have just roughly split them in halves and sent them to us, but he's far too anal retentive for that. No, first he organized all the bricks by color. Now this wasn't a ridiculously large collection like some people probably have, but it's still maybe 4-5 cubic feet of Legos.

Then once he had that done, the real fun began. He pulled out all the instruction sheets we'd saved and started pulling out the blocks for them. I'm not sure what he sent to my sister, but I got one big set and three smaller ones, all nicely segregated in their own little Ziploc bag. Of course that was along with the other six bags of bricks, neatly organized by color.

Whether it was luck, or maybe him remembering that it was my favorite, I ended up with the Galaxy Explorer. Just a few weeks ago my 3 1/2 year old was bored, and I told him about this cool rocket ship we could build, so I pulled it out and started putting it together. The instruction booklet has all these cute little check marks next to all the pieces; my dad marking off what he'd found. Occasionally there's an 'X'; something that was missing that I needed to go find a substitute for. As it was, my finished Galaxy Explorer had some odd white plates underneath and a few other out of place bricks, but it was good enough.

My son played with it every night after our youngest went to bed. (Didn't want him eating any carelessly dropped bricks.) It didn't take him long before he'd progressed to a new favorite method of play: pulling the heads off of all the minifigs and making neat little stacks of them, along with little rows of legs and torsos. I'd think there was something wrong with him, but I distinctly remember making little stacks of minifig heads myself.

Much to the chagrin of my wife, I've used this as an opportunity to start buying more Lego sets, which is great, because he can't really follow directions yet, so I get to put them all together.