With CGI technology, the horror and spectacle of the Gordon Riots of 1780 chronicled in Dicken's Barnaby Rudge can be finally brought to the screen, including people actually drowning in booze from the burning of Langdale's wine and spirits warehouse. Almost all Americans and probably most Britons are completely unaware that rioters had the complete run of London for almost three days, right in the middle of the American Revolution. Too bad I don't have time to work on my screenplay!

In Britain and many other countries, physicians complete a five-year Bachelor of Medicine/Bachelor of Surgery degree and are awarded the title--but not the degree--of Doctor. This is because the general education portion of an American undergraduate degree is not a part of these degrees under the British system. There seems to be some assumption that they get more "general education" in secondary school, but in my experience this is not the case as I get students all the time out of British-style education who enter our graduate program with a Bachelor of Engineering, who have NEVER written a research paper, either in secondary school or in college. This hinges on your opinion of the value of general education; I happen to be a believer, which I guess makes me a believer in the American-style eight-year medical school path.

Some schools cover the gamut; the university where I teach has Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology; we also have an undergraduate business program which is introducing substantial specializations in CS or IT. We have CE and CS through the PhD level and IT through a Master's Degree. BTW, I teach information technology and have for nine years now, and IT works very well in a university environment. Lately some employers hiring coders have been seeking out our graduates over CS grads because coders in our IT program emerge as application developers, while coders from CS are just programmers--they know all the underlying algorithms but don't know how to apply them to solving real business problems.

First, I'm not going to fly TOWARD someone who is illuminating me with a laser; I hope you can see that would be very foolish. Second, the general populace tends to get rather upset when you fly a helicopter low enough to chase people on foot, especially one as large as I flew. Third, people don't fly helicopters for fun--it costs too much to fly them--and this means that when we're flying, we're on a mission and can't just go haring off after boneheads with lasers. In my case it was a Navy helicopter.

It certainly can damage your vision even at fairly long ranges, and helicopters fly considerably lower than most aircraft.

Can't safely wear them in a cockpit, and certainly not at night

...by a laser while piloting a helicopter and it's scary as hell. I don't have a solution but I sure wish I did. There are some sick puppies out there that this continues to go on. These people should be arrested and prosecuted but I recognize that it's difficult to impossible to catch these idiots.

As a professional pilot/flight instructor/aircrew coordination trainer with 3500 hours, I think this is pretty much insane. I would not fly any airline that did this.