So, it's got wireless and I don't even know if they make Nomads anymore. But: no handwriting input, no web cam. Lame.

These days, people only mine Thorium while they're working on getting their skill up to the Fel Iron and outlands level. One thing worth noting is that somewhere in the past few patches, they've made it so you can mine Fel Iron at 275, which is pretty nice. No more running around the Eastern Plaguelands looking for Rich Thorium Nodes for those last few points when you'd rather be in Hellfire Peninsula.

I went to google scholar, typed in "museum technology children" and this link:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=503376.503430&type=series

was on the first page. The second and third pages have more interesting potential as well. There's a whole area of research on museum education as well as journals both practical and theoretical. I'm sure there's stuff out there that can help.

Posts on slashdot are all exciting and interesting and stuff, but journal articles and other sources are peer-reviewed and typically written by people with real expertise in the field (e.g., Ph.Ds)

No, it hasn't.

Science fiction isn't about "telling the future", it's about making commentary about the Human Condition, putting together entertaining yarns, looking at what-if scenarios in society. Do you think PKD really believed any of the futuristic technology he talked about (read Ubik for a nice example) was really possible? Who knows - it's just a necessary condition to set up the scenario in which we can see interesting ideas play ouy.

Any quick read of the New Masters of SF (china mieville, ian macdonald, iain m banks, ken mcleod, dan simmons) will show you that the genre is alive, kicking, and more literary than ever before.

I love my Razer naga, but it's worth noting that the Naga's buttons are not reprogrammable. They're either the top row of your keyboard or they're the number pad. If this is really 18 fully-programmable buttons, it's got more functionality that way. Of course, it's totally lacking in the Panache department. I mean, where's the cool backlight?

Heh, I just posted this response in a different thread, but it's just as applicable here. I guess that's what [redundant] means, but if both posts get up to 5, both rebuttals ought to, eh?

It doesn't have all that high of a mortality rate so far, so it is not (currently) all that fatal (although - in 1918, the mortality rate was estimated to be between 10 and 20 percent. Of course, we've got better drugs these days).

However, since most seasonal influenza is of the H3 family instead of the H1 family, our regular immunities won't protect us very well. This makes H1N1 likely to be very widespread - lots of people who typically don't get sick will get sick. It's not like we're all going to start living The Stand or anything, but it is a pretty significant event. We have a major flu pandemic only a few times a century.

It is, so it is not (currently) all that fatal (although - in 1918, the mortality rate was estimated to be between 10 and 20 percent. Of course, we've got better drugs these days).

However, since most seasonal influenza is of the H3 family instead of the H1 family, our regular immunities won't protect us very well. This makes H1N1 likely to be very widespread - lots of people who typically don't get sick will get sick. It's not like we're all going to start living The Stand or anything, but it is a pretty significant event. We have a major flu pandemic only a few times a century.

I still use my Dreamcast from time to time. I love having a real controller attached to my emulators - I play old games on the dreamcast, and long ago hacked a NES-style square controller into one of the dreamcast's inputs for extra-real castlevania and whatnot. As a nostalgia machine, it's great. Of course nowadays you can play homebrewed games on your PC or what have you, but there's something much more exciting about using a real console machine. Dunno why.

I don't know why you'd particularly want to run X11 on a kindle, or certain apps. But there's definitely a space here for stuff like other eBook formats, word-processing (eInk looks great when you're outside), and improving on the general Kindle user experience. For example - the DX has PDF reading, but there's no real organization of PDFs other than by filename. What if I want to organize all my work PDFs (journal articles and whatnot) by journal, author, keyword, etc? Wouldn't it be cool if someone ported Papers to the Kindle DX?

Generally speaking, I love the Kindle hardware as a display device. The interface and user experience is pretty terrible, especially coming from a regular computer where there's always SOMETHING you can download to fix your problems.

It's really annoying to have to manually launch a browser and tweet every time I take a dump. Automated poop-tweeting (at least from home) is a godsend.

It pulled information about me and my friends and showed it to me. Most of that information looked shared, that is, it wasn't anything I couldn't otherwise see by just clicking on a friend's facebook page. But it's information that would be private to some random app developer.

That's the problem - you mark most of your profile as "private" so only friends can see it. But then a friend of yours runs an app (any app at all), and the app has all the privileges that your friend does, allowing the app to gather all the "private" data that you wanted hidden from the Wide World. A popular enough application (mafia wars, etc) could pull a ton of data about people and just sit on it.

I've no clue what the Men in the Black Helicopters want with a bajillion pictures of people in semi-compromising situations and a ton of half-thought out wall posts and other such drivel, but there we are.

Haven't they ever seen any movies? Or watch television shows?

"Hai guysz, lookit! I made an artificially-intelligent evil supergenius! What could go wrong?"

On the macintosh version at least, the 'check for updates' menu item is in the Help menu. Because that's clearly where it belongs. I only found it because I was just about to search the help for advice on where to find it.

http://n7.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/summary/id=ae8199f5-24744-ed002743-edf2-4f04-8f17

from the report:
"Direct UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) is allowed.
The applet was also able to directly request a large DNS response."