Enjoy the lack of tourist traffic on I-4? Reclaim International Drive for the environment and plant wildflowers? Diversify the local economy so we're not all dependent on how many Brazilians and English we can sucker into spending time here in the middle of summer?

Hey, a girl can dream.

I think you should consider what your students have already read and avoid it. Being forced to read Farenheit 451 and The Time Machine from grade school through high school because teachers don't pay attention to each other's syllabi gets really old. Check with the other lit teachers and see what they normally make their kids read before you commit to a curriculum. I think it would be best to try to introduce students to something they haven't already been exposed to. If they're taking a sci fi lit class in high school I'd wager that's what they want from you anyway.

I was thinking more along the lines of "BattleGate Univoyager" not so boldly leaning towards an edgy SG series. I don't know about you but I wasn't impressed by Dr. Gauis Rush, token bad boy Starbuck-esque soldier, Admiral badass, and the sniveling brat with the Harvard degree. Not to mention fatty McGamer Boy our delightfully quirky super genius who remains surprisingly cool in tough situations, and I'm not a real doctor Hottie McNursemaid. I would have much preferred an entirely new series, something legitimately dark and edgy like Battlestar, not a rehashed and poorly acted SG soap in space. But there aren't really any other new sci-fi options at the moment. I'll watch until I can't think of any new jokes or snide remarks during the episodes, or something better comes along. And who the hell on slashdot watches commercials anyway? I thought this was a congregation of intelligent people...

I would say when there's an empire with hegemony, things are pretty chill within the core of the empire. The rest of the world doesn't live in peace because Britain or America decides they're the sole power governing the world. Actually, the empire tends to stir the pot by hoarding resources and causing inequities elsewhere, conducting proxy wars against lesser powers, punishing those who do not go along with the will of the empire, etc. Just because we had the werewithall to call ourselves a "hegemon" doesn't make us any less of an empire, and we certainly haven't been benevolent, in other words things were not and are not "pretty chill" for the majority of the world.

Really? I didn't think the wars actually stopped. You must mean wars among countries that matter....spare me the democratic peace research, that only applies to wars between democracies, not democracies and any other government type, and those tend to be quite frequent. What you will see is the next empire fighting for supremacy, perhaps an actual large scale war, though I doubt it. In this case the winner will be China, followed closely by India, perhaps with another hot/cold war period as those two juggernauts duke it out for international supremacy.

Restraint and civility? Hardly. What you get is an empire/hegemon that takes what it wants, forces it's will on others, and shows very little in the way of restraint or civility, sometimes even to its allies. Unilateralism at its finest. Anyhow, its interesting how you try to bring it back to Hobbes at the end, though I'm not sure he would agree you. He, and most realists, would classify all of time as a no holds barred death match, not just the inter-empire period. To the point of the article: There isn't much we can do about Iran obtaining nuclear weapons. If they've been able to obtain the technology and equipment under heavy sanctions further sanctions are unlikely to have the desired effect. I think it's high time we stop meddling in the internal affairs of other states. We participated heavily in the arms race in the Middle East, I don't see how we have any right to say what they can and cannot acquire, especially after we armed Israel to the teeth.

First of all, ISPs are not operating in a free market. In a free market, customers would optimally want to make a cost/benefit analysis of the competing ISPs, focusing on issues such as quality and technological supremecy, and (gasp) price. However, a large population of people don't actually have a choice of provider when it comes to broadband. ISPs are operating in the broadband market in most areas as an approved monopoly. Since they aren't worried about competition, they can arbitrarily set pricing without even taking quality or customer satisfaction into account. They also have less incentive for innovating and implementing new technologies when they become available.

Interesting results, but I find flaw with the tests. If we're really discussing two different types of absorbtion, purely visual and audio/visual, and the tests are made up of entirely visual questions, aren't the researchers tipping the scales in favor of the purely visual non-multitaskers? From the article: "A survey defined two groups: those who routinely consumed multiple media such as internet, television and mobile phones, and those who did not." The ones not consuming multiple media are consuming what? My guess would be books and newsprint, and if so, are they visual learners? How did they control for intelligence level? If the visual group is on average smarter than the audio/visual group, would that not also skew the results? More information is needed and less conjecture.

I'd never want to drive with you on I-4 then, that road must be a headache for you. Through Orlando it technically runs north to south but the directional markers on the road are east and west (as it runs across the state from Tampa to Daytona). And it's hardly ever an hour to an hour and half on I-4 to the beach. Hell you can't even get from Maitland to downtown in an hour most of the time.

I'm glad it works for someone. I've been an MS user since grade school, and as far as layout goes, Word has remained *roughly* the same since. There was nothing wrong with the layout, it wasn't hurting anyone the way it was, and it wasn't really that complicated. On the contrary, I work very quickly off positional memory when I write, so for a long time user, it's pretty fast. When I opened up my thesis on my school's library computer and was forced to use Office 2007, I almost threw the damn PC out of the window. I couldn't find ANYTHING! There is nothing intuitive about the setup, and I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out that the logo was a drop down menu. It took me 20 minutes just to save. Now granted, I may not be the most tech saavy person, but neither is the average user, and I'd like to think I'm above average intelligence. If I had a hard time figuring it out, imagine what Joe Sixpack is going to do?? Or my parents? I mean FFS, if you're going to change essential programs so radically, at least make them user friendly. I adapted to open office much faster.