There are lots of classes that require essays or projects where it is essentially a giant waste of the students time. This includes doing videos and presentations for almost any course (a really well taught audio production course wanted every student to do a video essentially repeating a subset of the same material he just did.

Same here. When I realised we were expected to do a video presentation, my only reaction was What the fuck???. I still can't understand the purpose of this.

On the other side, the course was very good, and the prof. pretty easy to follow.

Take a history class and get back to us.

I don't think you get what White Privilege and Heterosexual Privilege are, but you should maybe* look into that.

*definitely

Just like Flickr!

Yep. At first a few rogue scientist find something new. Then that 'something new' gets peer reviewed, discussed about, put through scientific screening, whatever. After that a few rogue scientists do NOT think the scientifically model is correct enough. (or the other way around)

We now have a whopping 97% of scientists thinking the models of global warming and the human factor therein is correct. So at some point 97% of scientists did not believe that global warming existed and / or was man made. The scientific advance is that we now have models that imply global warming is real and man-made. Is that what you wanted to say?

I may buy a tablet in the next year or two, but I'm not planning letting go of my B&W Kindle w/ e-ink -- unless it's to replace it with a color e-ink model.

Trying to read a book on a backlit LCD screen in a pain in the ass on a good day and simply not possible in direct sunlight.

I love that Amazon has made (quite good) Kindle apps for just every piece of hardware I own - and I use them - but mainly for trying out samples and calling up specific passages.

Once you get hooked on e-ink, it's hard to go back to anything else.

Do you think it is in the purview or expertise of the Federal government to tell private business what products they must offer?

But that would entail making improvements.

I haven't seen any since 2006.

Sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree here.

Monetize a specific treatment, don't monetize the idea of treatment - it's incredibly unethical and immoral.

The same way we've been doing it for over 20 years?

You digitize it and create a digital intermediate, edit it, do all your other post mojo, spit out either a finished digital copy and/or spit out an EDL and have a lab matchback to film by cutting a negative to conform to your edits.

Needless to say, that's a huge simplification (the post workflow can be loooooooong, with lots of hand-offs to different specialists) but that's the basic idea.

Did you think editors were physically cutting film? That went away by the mid-90s, outside of niche filmmakers and film students. And even today's film students are likely to go through school without cutting actual celluloid.

It's a skill that's great to have simply because it teaches you to be economical and plan ahead. Editors who started on film often have an easier time of planning their edits, rather than dicing things up in the timeline until something looks good.

The worst part is, the people who pushed this legislation are the same ones who will dance over the remains of a bankrupt Post Office, proudly declaring that "greedy" workers were to blame. Even though no government agency, union or private company would even dream up something like this. I'm pretty sure pre-funding 75 years of retirement in a decade's time would get a CEO / board of directors sacked in oh... about a week.

It's actually a two-pronged assault. The primary goal is to destroy the finances of an institution the legislative branch is constitutionally-mandated to preserve. The second is to continue the war on worker pensions and benefits, while shaming those who believe the quality of life enjoyed by past generations is something to aspire to.

They really believe all of that silly retirement stuff our parents and grandparents did was a manifestation of pure avarice and laziness.

I have a soft spot for the new Start Screen. I find it much more appealing than the old Start Menu which seemed more like a Start Slab by the time it was deprecated. The initial concept had been compromised by the amount of crap that it was asked to handle. Using a tile-based system is a great way to package different sources of data and information into neat little groupings. We can agree to disagree on that one.

My problem is that the rest of the Metro UI doesn't really follow the lead of the Start Screen at all. Aesthetically, it jettisons the entire look and feel for what seems like a bunch of images and text adrift in a lot of whitespace.

Icons have little or no depth at all. They don't really adhere to their origins in minimalist mass transit iconography as the Start Screen does, nor do they acknowledge the benefits of effective drop shadows - or really any developments since the year 2000. I'm pretty sure the version of KDE that shipped with my copy of LinuxPPC 1999 was the aesthetic equal in this one regard.

Text is widely spread out with no clear delineation between where one active area begins and another ends. Even info grouped together appears to take up a significant amount of screen real estate. Not due to font sizing issues, but rather, the line spacing and just random weirdness in the layout. It reminds me less of an OS and more of a poorly-designed Web 2.0 site.

I work in TV / Film production. In the real world.

I've also produced off-air promo reels before - which is basically what the IRS tried to do here. You have no idea how much this sort of thing costs.

As he refuses to greenlight single player games.

Which should not be construed as even a suggestion that the man should lose his job. I don't believe the appropriate response here would be to destroy a man's livelihood. I would like him to reconsider his policy, though.