The hardware on which the Matrix was running was the humans' brains networked together. (Imagine a Beowulf cluster...). The harvested energy part was a terrible case of executive meddling.

I justify the "thermodynamics" argument as we only hear about the battery thing from Morpheus, who may have gotten bad information, and we never hear from the machines as to what the Matrix is actually for.

I would gladly pay IMAX 3D prices to see a 2-hour Daft Punk video. I'm not even kidding, and I'm looking forward to TRON Legacy next week.

Users who are using Voiceover aren't responding to colored blobs, they are using Voiceover's auditory scanning. It reads aloud what is on the screen, such as the labels on the icons, and the user doubletaps anywhere on the screen to select one. You don't have to see the screen at all.

A terrorist attack also doesn't have to be perfect to be good. Neither the shoe, underwear, nor toner-cartridge bombs went off and they still cost $billions. Unfortunately, the long-term economics of this don't favor us.

Wow. Your district sucks. My jury notice came something like five months in advance for selection and the trial was a good six weeks after that.

I agree with you. I think the solution to this is Problem-Based Learning. That is, allowing a specific problem that the learner faces (or has chosen to confront) to act as the framework that guides him or her into new learning. The outcomes of the learning are judged on the degree to which the learner can do something in the real world with that learning. This is perfect for the autodidacts, since classrooms, while efficient for imparting knowledge, are not very good places to assess it.
  However, an instructor still has a role in PBL to guide the student to think about problems they wouldn't otherwise have been aware of; and diplomas are indicators that the learner has been exposed to a sufficiently broad range of problems.

I'm either going to explain a cultural reference to non-Americans, or I'm going to overexplain a joke and get "Whoooshed". (Both, probably, now that I've mentioned it).

On network TV, during commercial breaks in prime time (8pm-11pm), the evening news, which comes on at 11, will "tease" a story that they're reporting on with a short summary and the promise of some exciting video in order to keep you watching after your show is over. "Fire guts popular downtown restaurant. Film at 11." Taking that common phrase out of context, the meme has become "[Obvious statement]. Film at 11."

My brother lost his first tooth to an accident. He fell down stairs and knocked it out. This was long before it would have fallen out naturally (maybe age four?) He went through the usual ritual of putting it under his pillow and the Tooth Fairy left him some money for it just as she had done for me when I lost teeth.
Our mom came upon him the next day hitting himself in the face with a wooden block trying to break his other teeth out for more money. This sort of approach would never have occurred to me.
Fortunately, he's not an insufferable prick, just a really (self-destructively at times) hard worker.

My brother kept bees in high school and he did purchase bees in this way. The packages tend to hum audibly. The carriers actually do handle those boxes rather gingerly.

Okay, I'm not the biggest C.S. Lewis fan, either, but that was the succinct and pithy quote on this topic. Time for the tl;dr version. Do you have a way to impugn cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner? (pardon the copypasta hyphenation)

One of the major speculations about primate evolution is that it is based on the progressive selection of a distinctive pattern of immaturity. It is this pattern of progressive selection that has made possible the more flexible adaptation of our species. Too often this pattern is overexplained by noting that human immaturity is less dominated by in- stinct and more governed by learning.

Because our ultimate concern is with the emer- gence of human adaptation, our first concern must be the most distinctive feature of that adaptation. This feature is man's trait, typical of his species, of "culture using," with all of the intricate set of implications that follow. Man adapts (within lim- its) by changing the environment, by developing not only amplifiers and transformers for his sense organs, muscles, and reckoning powers, as well as banks for his memory, but also by changing literally the properties of his habitat. Man, so the truism goes, lives increasingly in a man-made environment.

This circumstance places special burdens on human immaturity. For one thing, adaptation to such variable conditions depends heavily on opportuni- ties for learning, in order to achieve knowledge and skills that are not stored in the gene pool. But not all that must be mastered can be learned by direct encounter. Much must be "read out" of the culture pool, things learned and remembered over several generations: knowledge about values and history, skills as varied as an obligatory natural language or an optional mathematical one, as mute as using levers or as articulate as myth telling. Yet, though there is the gene pool, and though there exist direct experience and the culture as means for shaping immaturity, none of these di- rectly prepares for the novelty that results when man alters his environment. That flexibility de- pends on something else.

Bruner, J.S. (1972) Nature and Uses of Immaturity. American Psychologist, 8, 687-708.

Play is essential to the advancement of the human species and it does not stop in adulthood. We've been able to assimilate all this new tech into our culture because we play with it. And that becomes increasingly more essential as tech advancement accelerates.

Don't make me get out the Vygotsky and Tomasello. I'm home for a holiday and there's nothing but parades and football on TV. I can do this all day.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
--C.S. Lewis

You don't even have to get the walk sequence perfect. A lot of people with partial paralysis walk with walkers or canes. Imperfect, but still better than a chair.

I've seen the ads, but in classic Microsoft fashion they're marketing the operating system with little to no emphasis on what phone you'd buy to get it or what carriers' retail stores will stock it. Say what you want about Apple, but no one was ever confused about what an iPhone was or where to get one.

Interesting that EDS also processes the insurance claims for Medicare.