OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days. Now etgay utoy foay ymay awnlay.

Apparently they don't even teach Pig Latin correctly anymore. Eeshshay!

Just as it takes more than skillful special effects to make a great movie, it takes more than good graphics to make a great game. You'd think these points would be obvious but there are quite clearly game (and movie) makers out there who don't get them.

About six years ago I lived in an eastside suburb of Seattle and subscribed to Netflix. I cancelled after about four months because during that time four movies never reached me and I wound up paying Netflix for one of them (I probably could have avoided that if I'd made a stink, but as I figured it they'd already eaten the cost of several other movies.)

Around about that time a substantial check that I was expecting to receive disappeared in the mail, and I noticed that other items were disappearing in the mail, too. I called to cancel a magazine gift subscription a well-meaning relative had signed me up for and discovered that they'd been sending the magazine for six months, though I had only received one issue. Between the movies, the magazines, and the missing check it was clear that I had a problem with disappearing mail.

So I went down to the local post office and asked to speak with the local postmaster. I explained about the missing magazines, movies, and check, and told him that I suspected I was a victim of ongoing mail theft.

He assured me that he'd look into the situation and was turning to go back into the bowels of the post office when I interrupted. "You're lying," I said. He said something to the effect of "That's an awfully rude thing to say for no reason," but I knew he had no intention of seriously looking into my complaint and I told him why. During our entire conversation I hadn't mentioned my address and he never asked.

His body language led me to believe that he had a carrier on his staff (or possibly several) that he knew was stealing mail. I figured as soon as I told him I was losing mail he knew who the likely culprit was without even having to ask which route I was on but either couldn't or wouldn't stop them.

Shortly thereafter I moved to a small town in Alaska. The mail service here is reliable and the people at the post office are very nice. To the best of my knowledge none of my mail has ever gone missing here. I've talked to other people who have had mail problems and everything I've heard has lead me to believe that the reliability of your mail depends a great deal on the people working at the post office nearest you and in some places at the nearest big sorting center.

It's a shame, because if you live in a place where the service is good, the USPS is pretty nifty. You tend not to think of it because the mail is so ordinary, but the fact that I can drop a piece of paper in the box on the corner here on an island in southeast Alaska and for $0.42 someone will carry it to my family back in Michigan or even halfway around the world is really pretty remarkable.

Instead of uploading a paper to a printer, why not email it directly to your professor? If they feel the need to have a printed copy, let them print it.

Your suggestion has several major problems, particularly:

• It either requires all of the students to convert their documents to a common interchange format or requires the professor to have a working copy of every application their students use to prepare their work.
• It exposes the professor to unnecessary risk from virus-infected documents.

There are many other more surmountable objections (e.g. it depends on the reliability of an electronic submission process that has not been discussed but which is likely to be less than 100% reliable, etc.) but the first two are enough to kill it as far as I'm concerned.