Macs with their shorter useful life.
I don't know about a shorter useful life. There are enough people who, especially with the advent of OCLP, have been effectively using Macs that are 15+ years old. These same Intel Macs will also run Linux once OCLP ages out.
This sounds about right. In 1986 (or was it 1987?), we bought the NES (incl. the Super Mario Bros. cartridge) for $79.99 retail (probably at Sears or JC Penney--some mall department store). In the fall of 1991, I bought the SNES at Circuit City for $199.99 retail--the clerks were still setting up their sales displays as I grabbed one and speed-walked to the checkout.
As far as games go, I remember purchasing in 1990 the original NES Final Fantasy at Toy's'R'Us for $69.99 retail--the most I'd ever spent on a game at that point. Older games were on the same shelves for as low as 12.99 and 14.99--Castlevania II--Simon's Quest, for one, which was already a couple of years old at that point.
While some admissions essay prompts allow for the kind of exaggerated adversity stories suggested in the summary, there are ample opportunities to showcase other traits and talents beyond overcoming challenges. See the Common Application prompts, for example, where only 1 of the 7 base prompts asks about "challenges, setbacks, or failure."
Likewise, the University of California system, through their Personal Insight Quetions, asks for 2 out of 8 possible prompts to focus explicitly on challenges and adversity.
The purpose of the admissions essay, in letter and in spirit, is to allow the students to provide, in their own words, a fuller context for the data contained within their applications. If only more high school seniors (and more so their parents) would stay true to this, we might see fewer exaggerated or bloated or fabricated adversity and hardship essays.
It is way easier (much faster) to skim through the RSS feeds for headlines, rather than going to the website itself.
This captures it perfectly.
I've 63 subscribed feeds, about 55 of which I review daily. Skimming for relevant headlines and then opening those pages in new tabs has become a central part of how I, and others I've introduced the feature to over the years, find and read articles on the web. I've curated a wide range of sources through LiveBookmarks and RSS, and this Firefox feature has been the most efficient way for me to find items of interest. I might also add that I'm using, by today's bleeding-edge standards, antiquated hardware, as I'm sure not an insignificant number of users do, and the RSS feature helps to facilitate web browsing.
(And, I saw the headline for this story through my RSS feed for Slashdot.)
In the Coda to the novel Bradbury says, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
Fahrenheit 451 is less about book censorship and more about the suppression and destruction of free thought. Fire in the novel symbolizes both its inevitable destruction and eventual rebirth, as it might exist in a world full of minority opinions at odds with those of a majority.
Books, in the world of the novel, have become scapegoats of unhappiness for a majority of people; consequently these books must be annihilated to keep the people content, dare I say pacified--see the scene with Mildred and her friends when Montag reads Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" to them, for example.
In addition, these books aid the populace to think on its own, making the totalitarian government’s power more difficult to maintain.
Finally, Beatty tells Montag that the “real beauty” of fire is that “it destroys responsibility and consequences." Not only do books make the population uneasy, but also the “responsibility and consequences” of using the knowledge found in these volumes is too complex an onus for Montag's society to bear. The masses cannot think of solutions to its problems and instead throws accountability into their furnaces.
So yes, on some superficial level, a novel about book burning does touch upon censorship. But what makes Bradbury's work so great is that there is so much more at work below the censorship surface.
(Also: There's an high school English teacher on Slashdot? How do you not spend all your nights weeping?)
Ha!
The tears ran dry a decade ago my friend. As torturous as some posts here are, they are Shakespearean compared to some of the dreck that I read daily (AP notwithstanding).
So I started spewing what English teachers love. I used words like "juxtaposition" and "antithesis" and compared the rose to some other random symbolic object in the book. It was pure, unadulterated, Grade A, premium All-American BS.
I got an A on the paper.
If you were in the high school class that I teach, you wouldn't have fared so well: I snuff out that "premium All-American BS" as fast as possible. At my school, our "Top 10" students usually include some of the best writers on campus who are generally used to breezing through their English classes with ease--until they reach me. By the time they finish my class and graduate, they (they intelligent ones, anyway) learn that Addressing essay prompts Accurately earns A's and that Filling papers with Fluff earns F's.
Good teachers won't be fooled by vacuous writing, and the best won't pretend in order to boost a student's self-esteem.
* UNIX is a Trademark of Bell Laboratories.
