No grinding in RDR? Oh, the activities are slightly different, but here's a partial list of activities you must repeat over and over.

Ride the (train | horse) a long time.
Talk with a (paranoid hermit | old fart | grizzled miner).
Round up some (cows | horses) that got loose.
Save a (child | whore).
Help a stranger.
Kill a (wolf | cougar | bear), or several.
Play a game of (sharpshooter | knife & fingers | poker).

Your percentage of completed game also feels like the percentage of world you must traverse on every mission.

I didn't mind buying RDR and playing the amount I did. I'm a sucker for large virtual worlds you can explore, and Rockstar delivers just that. But as a game it's a chore.

Your comment about Portland's cost evaluation interested me, and for others with similarly piqued interests, I found this explanation by PolitiFact Oregon:
http://www.politifact.com/oregon/statements/2011/mar/19/sam-adams/portland-mayor-sam-adams-says-portlands-spent-its-/

The only correction I have is that the estimate is for 1 mile of urban highway, not 3.

Interesting stuff.

I wonder if it was Eastasia, or if those longtime friends of Eurasia betrayed us...

I've not followed what has happened with previous id releases.
What have people done with them?

The display XOOMs (and other devices) are tortured devices. The XOOM on display at a nearby Verizon was running some live background, plus having all kinds of widgets across all screens. It was a mess, and crashed within a couple minutes of me picking it up.

That said, my XOOM runs great, we use it all the time to check weather, music and maps. It's a great device. What we like about it is the device just floats around the house, so whenever we need to look up something, it's right there, and it's a more usable screen than a smartphone. I don't remember it ever crashing with our normal use.

Oh, and I just tried accessing your test page, and it came up fine.

Android phones have come a long way from the short battery capacities of say, the G1.

I put my Atrix on the charger last night when it was down to 30%. The phone's recorded battery "uptime" at that point was 2 days, 11 hours. This is with my normal phone+email+web usage.

But use the navigation app for even a little while, and the battery doesn't last long with all that HW turned on: GPS, screen, graphics, network radio, etc.

The Tesla S. We must do TORCS to it.
Yesssssssssss.

Isn't this true of any computer, or your washer and dryer, your house's AC system, or your car? DIY is always cheaper because you simply don't have to pay for somebody else's time and profit margin. The limiting factors include your own ability to disassemble and properly reassemble the thing, and having access to adequate knowledge/documentation.

I totally agree with you though, that $755 is a ridiculous repair fee.

As weird as this is to the "concerned parents and teachers" in Oklahoma, it is a basic effect of our minds and perception. There are no demons, no narcotic gateways, no pushers, and for most people, no permanent effects(*).

When the "Brain Machine" aka Sound-Light Machine (SLM) article came out in MAKE, I immediately built one. For me, it works great, and the visuals I see tend to be geometric patterns, depending on the frequency of the beats. It can be quite intense. For those who haven't seen this, apart from the silly graphics on the glasses as pictured in the article, the "brain machine" is a pair of safety glasses with LEDs, the microcontroller, and a headphone jack. The LEDs flash in synchronicity to the binaural beats, and this is what makes it so powerful -- your brain gets two very important senses stimulated the same way. Once the sequence finishes, the effect is totally over, there is no linger feeling, or "high" or demonic possession.

They used to sell audio cassettes that had binaural beat recordings. After I built the SLM, a friend showed me cassettes he had purchased a couple decades ago in Europe, but I haven't heard them to compare.

(*) The only caution I can think of is the possibility of bad effects in people susceptible to seizures. I don't know enough about that condition to know if seizures can be triggered through our hearing, but the SLM-like devices could possibly be a trigger to light-sensitive individuals.

One can find lots of related devices on the net. In no order are:
MindSpa
Procyon AVS
For helping with autism: Audio/Visual Entrainment

Seeing this video I can't help but laugh. It's the same tired Suburbanite Scare Story that D&D was in the 70's-80's, or that "satanic cults" were in the 80's.

/me makes awkward arm gesture: Motorola is not the Droid you are looking for, hackers.