Seems like this could be a good way for the postal service to make some money too -- provide postal service lobbies with video and a security guard, and people pay $1 or so to use it. Bring them back to relevence :)

Yeah; I remember digging out the Apple ][ that ended up in the janitorial closet not too long after it showed up -- I can thank where I am today for the fact that I convinced my teachers to let me mess around with that after I'd completed all my schoolwork (it drove me to accomplish my work faster, AND taught me the basics of ProDos BASIC). After I showed them some of what I had learned from it, they moved it back out to the Library and kept an Oregon Trail floppy loaded, and teachers could sign for a time slot for "worthy" students. Thankfully by that point, I was already hooked on computers.

Students with no technology would be sitting naked in the dust. Students with too much technology would have equipment at hand that they had no hope of learning to master (or in some cases even use).

Tech is neither the problem nor the solution. The problem is outside (and inside) agencies attempting to use objects to solve their teaching problems. Technology is just another word for Tool. It's possible to have a really good teaching session with a bunch of 5-year-olds wielding iPads. It's also possible to have just as good a teaching session with a bunch of 5-year-olds wielding blocks or finger paints.

The big thing people have to realize is that "new" technology doesn't make it better OR worse technology. We've now got to the point where people have more tools to accomplish a task than they have time to accomplish those tasks. So just pick a few tools out of the set and use them appropriately to the task.

Really -- it's not that hard.

I'm surprised you left out the TSA -- that should be the control question.

...which is why they've never contacted us. Same reason very few people try to make contact with plankton blooms. There's another thought experiment that postulates we're being approached by aliens all the time (in geological time), but that we not only have no way to identify them as living or intelligent, but don't even have a way to measure that they exist. That likely goes the other way too -- another intelligent life that is hydrocarbon-based would most likely destroy us without even noticing we existed.

Yeah; and for all those people who don't know what micelles are, they could have said surfactants. It's still a novel idea and soft on hands while you do dishes, but much less media-friendly.

The funny thing is, he's been working on 6 books over a span of 20 years.

Compare that to Terry Pratchett: 22 Discworld novels in the same timeframe, all in the same universe, all hanging together, including hanging together with the previous 18 novels he had written over the previous 13 years. And that's with him having Early Onset Alzheimer's which has caused his writing to slow considerably in the last 8 years.

Sure, they write in different sub-genres, but Martin could easily have broken his novels up in this manner as well, but chose not to.

Tolkien had to do it all by hand -- Martin has the luxury of software development and movie writing tools that will plot out all the charaters/relationships etc. and point out any potential inconsistencies. He also releases his manuscripts out to test groups, who among other things go over it for inconsistencies.

So doing something this complex isn't really all that complex these days. He can have the software split it all up into workable chunks that just have to hold together on their own, and meet up with the overall story arc at some point. The later books indicate that he's using some of these techniques because of how the writing style changed. I'm pretty sure he didn't do that on the first two or three.

Martin already stated that to avoid pulling a Jordan, he wrote the ending first, and gave copies to interested parties. He also wrote the storyline, so it's just the actual textual details and plot twists that haven't been fully hammered out yet.

What got me to start reading the series in the first place was his promise that he wouldn't leave the story arc open-ended and then die. He also got a thorough check-up from his doctor giving him a full bill of health prior to starting the TV series.

My point exactly; I'd rather live on actual plants and animals than on Soylent (funny thing that: based off of the name "Soylent Green" which is either made of people [with DNA] or soybeans and lentils [with DNA] -- but Soylent recipes exist which contain no DNA traces.)

Personally, I'd love government action on labeling ALL food products that DON'T contain DNA. It'd be nice to be able to separate the ultra-refined or synthetic foods from the real thing.

Wait... what?

I'm sure we've got climate zealots on here, but claiming that a request for clarification on which part is a scam, outlining the various ACTUAL issues for debate, doesn't seem very zealotish to me.

And it's a checklist that I think should be part of any debate on HIGW. I bet if each of those items were polled, we'd get much different results for each one than we do for HIGW as a whole.

...until the point where that one company has its software totally pwned, all source code released to the public, and an overproportionate number of security holes and backdoors found.

Suddenly, they're an industry pariah, not just because they were a scab, but because nobody can trust their prioduct anymore. The short term profit is not sustainable.

Same question from me -- VirtualBox is the basis for many niche solutions, such as http://www.cuckoosandbox.org/. The command-line toolset is great, and better than I've found for other similar products; you can easily do offline analysis of product runs, easily automate running test suites across multiple OSes, create a virtual network of VBox guests, and much more. VMWare does some of this, but is really aimed ad virtualized servers and desktops, not at testing and analysis. KVM could work, but is still maturing and hasn't quire reached the same level yet -- plus, it's nowhere near as portable to any host.

I also like that VBox inherits any improvements made in QEmu.