Good point. One of the perks of a super hero costume is that it draws so much attention you can't be recognized out in the rest of the world.

I went to the holiday party for the company this year. Because I'm just a voice on the phone to most people, I went almost completely unrecognized. It was kind of nice.

"IT guys are stereotyped as being a bit sloppy."

Fixed that for you.

It's worth wondering why IT is being singled out for uniforms. How about the folks in payroll? Or accounting? Just what is being said about IT here that can't be said about any other department in the company?

If IT needs a uniform, it's nothing more complex that a plumber's set of overalls. We spend all our time in the field crouched under desks and showing our ass cracks anyway, right? Now hand me that left-handed feeblegruber and get out of the way.

I don't know what that would look like, except maybe a browser with no plugin capability. Wave is designed to integrate so many web-centric technologies ... what you're asking for seems a lot like asking for an email client that didn't require written language to send messages.

Which would be cool, come to think of it. Maybe Google will give us that next?

You can still set up your own server though, and retain total control.

The creators went into a significant explanation of how you can federate your server to the outside world, or leave them entirely internal. The protocol is the really significant part, and the product is more like an expression of the protocol than the end-all-be-all implementation of it.

Great points. Here's my two cents.

I bought a N800 because it was the right hardware for what I wanted to do. I needed something I could write on, something I could instant message on occasionally, and something that was light enough and small enough to have on me all the time. Some phones are good for messaging, some notebooks are good for writing, but the N800 brought it together for me.

Having Maemo, the open source OS, come specially developed for the N800 was a super plus because it offered me a lot more flexibility. True, a lot of what's out there is the standard issue FOSS apps -- but that's the point. I've run SSH sessions from my N800 to diagnose headless server issues, for crying out loud.

The rest of the time, I write on it, do some twitter, and keep it comfortably out of the way but close at hand. It's a brilliant device, Nokia made some great hardware choices, but they're not in the software biz. FOSS only helps make it better, and was a solid development choice.

GOG want you to own your games and play whenever you want. Steam want you to rent your games, and play when you're connected to their servers and it's economically convenient.

What you do with your dollar is up to you.

Block it with the FlashBlock addon.

And apparently that meddlesome Doctor has modded my message of universal conquest down, thereby denying me the victory once again. Confound him!

The message that follows is of vital importance to you all...

MWAHAHAHAHAHA!

As a trained teaching guy: If I were to design a course with the objectives to "survey the histories of these genres and recognize how world events have been reflected onto other worlds," I would focus on the science fiction that uses contemporary topics and extrapolates current technologies.

Azimov? Clarke? Awesome, yes. Iconic, surely. But rockets, FTL, time travel, aliens ... all over-worked tropes. Kids have seen it and done it, beat the boss, posted the walkthrough on youtube. It's not sci-fi. It's the future of the archaic past.

Focus more on the future of the present.

Here's a story I'd love to include for a younger audience: Boyfriend, by Madeline Ashby. Kids subscribe to virtual boy- and girl-friend AI apps on their portable computers, and the AIs begin to rethink the meaning of their service to humanity. Listen to it on Escape Pod. Now *that* is a rich topic for today's generation of cell-phone slinging, hyper-connected, emotionally stuntable youth.

I absolutely adore Lovecraft. However, I'd save him for a specialty class, probably a college level class. His fecund verbosity overpowers my even my most perspicacious tendency, rendering opaque the once-transparent word hoards of narrators across the visages of time, sending my love of storytelling into the blissful quiet of a new dark age.

Seriously. Yuck.

Let the never-ending beta begin!

Well, I worked for Polar, so I'll give them a nod. They have an outstanding training program, the equipment is solid, and the beeps and boops you get from their gear is actually very informative and encouraging.

The F10 was their flagship HRM when I was there a few years ago. I've still got mine and I swear by it.

Many clocks in school have converted to digital now.

No second hand, so no pulse measurement. Unless you try to keep the kids still and attentive for an entire minute. Ever try that?

I proposed a product idea to the company that basically turned the HRM into a little play companion, a la tomagotchi. You fed it, watered it, played with it just like the normal one, but if you didn't exercise with it, it would get fat and die no matter what else you did with it.

If it tied to WoW, I wonder if kids would be inclined to play for PHAT DROPS.