You far underestimate the ability of people to justify things which feel or taste good. A good portion of my family (from the previous generation) was involved in farming animals either as a business or as a way to supplement the family food budget, and branch of family tree have been small town butchers. All of these people intimately knew the animals they ate and milked from birth to death and continued to eat and profit off of them.

My solution to the problem of being in situations where my laptop is often out of my control is to secure the data by full drive encryption and enabling the bios password etc; combined with making sure that the laptop I use is cheap enough that I can afford a loss or two a year. I save my money for good hardware for the items that will be behind the deadbolt and alarm (and be covered by the gold-standard insurance). Even so: protect the data and have savings ready for replacement of mission critical hardware.

I just had my office phone disconnected. I had been hating it for awhile, it rings and despite being at the lowest volume, interrupts whatever conversation I'm having with the person who actually came by my office to work. I haven't checked the voice mail in 3 years -- figuring that people can type me out a message which I will get from anywhere and can read in 30 seconds rather than the 2 minutes it takes someone to say the message. Once I found out how much our department was paying per phone I (and a number of others) volunteered to have ours removed.

Email for me is the perfect medium. I can read a message as many times as I like. I can frame my response, rewrite it until it says precisely what I want it to say, and send it at 3am in the morning without worrying about waking anyone up. Add to that I will get the message even if I've been on a plane for the last 12 hours.

The Amazon streaming service has some advantages over netflix already and netflix just hosed their big advantage - a reasonably priced way to get unavailable content made available: (a) Amazon's web streamer works seamlessly on any PC platform as there is no silverlight requirement; (b) Amazon has the subscription service, but they also offer pay-as-you-view service which is great for someone that only watches a few movies a month or watches sporadically (or like me uses it mainly while traveling); (c) different content available, there have definitely been some things I found on Amazon that I couldn't find on netflix (Sexy Beast the most recent).

Netflix's only remaining advantages: (1) it works on some devices like the Wii; (2) the per-view price on Amazon for tv shows is too high ( $0.99 per episode, $0.10-0.20 is where I think it gets reasonable ); (3) Amazon *may* have quality issues - the streaming player downgrades the video quality based on network quality, the question I don't have an answer for is what netflix would have done in a similar situation.

Certainly my family is going to have a discussion about switching, or canceling Netflix outright and using the Amazon pay-per-view option.

No. It is a problem with her advisor and the other mentors she has had at her school. Professors (and senior graduate students) should be teaching students that you are learning many things as part of your Ph.D. training: How to do research on a problem of interest, how to find a problem of interest, how to write a paper backing up your research findings, how to give a presentation of your research findings. These are all important. But they aren't the end.

You also need to be learning: How to explain your research to experts in your subject (department), how to explain your research to others in your discipline (college) [ We called this the "elevator talk" ], how to explain your research to those without a complete background (other graduate students), how to explain your research to students majoring in your department, how to explain your research to john q. public [ We called this the "airplane talk" ]. How to find funding and how to make a report on the results from funding.

Finally, and not every Ph.D. program gets this by a long shot, you need to be getting practice in teaching subjects both in your specialty and adjacent to it to students.

People can be narrow specialists in their research and still accomplish all of these things. I work with many of them, and I went to school with many others.

The Tick is a cartoon, not a comic book, but Mother-of-Invention would have to be my favorite scientist villain. Probably not the best (I think he would even admit that) but using a time-machine (which was already invented) to go back through time to kidnap inventors so that he could then invent their inventions! Genius.

Heck I'm even given grief for having co-authors on all my papers, and having multiple co-authors on my major (often cited) papers. I don't even want to imagine what kind of nonsense will be said about me if I try and claim a community edited document as my work-product. To be fair I use Wikipedia often - to the point where I decided to make a monetary contribution, and I have made small edits.

Besides, with places like www.arxiv.org much scientific work is freely available. I think the arxiv is a much better way to collect cutting edge data -- the only way to "correct" someones error is to submit a polite email to them, or submit your own paper as a counter point, either way there is a "damping" effect allowing both versions of a theory or result to persist at once for others to find and read. Only once the subject has reached the level of "textbook" should wikipedia become an important source for collecting and searching that information.

one I was aware of: the plant south of Houston had applied for a permit from the DOE to add 3 more reactors. I wouldn't be at all surprised if such applications end up being rejected now.

mod parent up! I am first rate clutz. I tend to spill coffee on my laptop on a weekly basis, I forget where I am and leave it unattended on a desk somewhere. Yes I shouldn't do these things. But regardless I do them. I am now 34 and I still do them. So when I get a laptop, first and foremost I consider cost. Frankly netbooks have been a god send for me. I can plunk the cost of a short domestic plane flight, and in two years when I drop a 2 litre bottle of wine on it from 6 feet up (what killed the last one), I can just pick up a new one at the next opportunity. Secondary considerations are the availability of linux drivers for the hardware, I tend to max out the RAM slots in whatever chassis I buy (usually salvaged from my last victim-top), a plethora of card slots, battery life and time, and heat (living in Texas).

Do the English have a right to free assembly? I honestly don't know, it isn't listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly

My colleague is a bitch to travel with. He has one of the most common names in the US and is hassled entering the country every time, to the point where it usually takes him an extra day to return from abroad because of the flights he misses while being interviewed by immigration. The only explanation he's ever had: "Sir your name is really common". His question which he still hasn't asked: So my name is really common? How common is my passport number?

Just so I can travel with him without having to worry if I'm going to see him again when we get back to the US, I'd like to see an identity document that can be used to uniquely identify a person (who wants to be identified, for example for purposes of travelling abroad). Seems like a passport could/should do the job but what the hell do I know.

I saw this idea in Physics classes at K-state. It uses any device which has a web browser (smart phone, pda, laptop, etc). I think it was called In-class or something like that. It was very bare bones and basic, but also very useful for what they wanted. The research seems to show an improvement in the students that use it. It even had some functionality not mentioned in this patent such as allowing for groups of students to pool their answers and then reevaluate based on what their group had answered.

To at least mitigate the effect of missing work for ... well no one knows how long. Every time I've been called I've spent 6 or more hours sitting around doing nothing. Its a bonus to have the laptop with me so at least I can keep some projects on track. No different from jurors that bring knitting, or a teacher who brings grading with them. Yes it crosses the line when one starts breaking the rules of contact with the outside world.

My wife served on a civil trial that took more than a week of her life and ended up being settled before they made a decision. I think the jurors should be permitted to bill the lawyers (and judge) for their time, for an hourly rate not more than twice their normal salary. It wouldn't fix the whole system, but it would help.

This is (one of) the reason(s) I started getting Wi-Fi capable phones. Plus I only have to have my wireless router configured. Seems like the better solution than a separate antenna system. Of course not every service supports UMA capability - or at least not on every phone that could have it.

That's the basic problem. Actually this is problem in a number of government run systems.