On the other hand, the comment
The U.S., by contrast, appears to outsiders to be a kind of forced melting pot. Come to America and you become American - squashing and subjugating your roots in order to fit in. Change your name, change your language, eat at McDs. [The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century :: Almost 30 years later, and I still don't belong]puzzles me (an American). I know of Korean, Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese neighborhoods, Greek and Ukrainian and Polish festivals and clubs, celebrations of every sort of ethnicity. And yet…I have to admit the West Side Story "who's a real American?" prejudices still flare up, or even burn steadily.
I suppose the commenter is correct somewhere: I haven't experienced all the evil the US has to offer.
There's still a slight whiff of vaporware in the air at Natick. Powering all these doodads, for instance, won't be easy. The Army wants to keep the total "power budget" for FFW down to 15 watts or so -- a quarter of what a typical light bulb takes. "We don't even know where to begin," sighed Kalish Shukla, FFW's power-management chief.They have at least one idea, though. "Avoid the use of Microsoft Windows operating systems," a recent memo on the subject directed. FFW is going open source. Cleaner software needs less energy to run.
I do need to finish [Dorothy Sayers' mystery] Strong Poison for The List at some point; I'm about through the chapters I'm helping out with, which is good. I was really happy to see that the chapters in question are all, for the most part, ones I'm really quite fond of--Miss Murchison learning to pick locks from Bill Rumm, the bit where Harriet sadly admits that she used to be good at piffling, and especially the part where Bunter ingratiates himself into the Urquhart household. Every time I read the description of the casseroled chicken, I want to make it. It sounds really good. And, of course, these chapters are the ones where the first hint of a clue that Harriet didn't kill Boyes appears. It's such a good book.I, too, want to make that "casseroled chicken," with the flavors perambulating around each other, and good layers of vegetables, with bacon at the bottom.
Time to get around to installing whatever anti-spam features MT offers.
Such insights challenged Intel's vision of a world of "smart homes" and a chip-driven lifestyle, Dr. Bell said, which assumes that users are secular. In those visions, there's no point at which residents stop to pray, visit a church, or have a moment of internal reflection. All this prompted her to ask David Tanenhaus, Intel's vice president of research: "What if our vision of ubiquitous computing is so secular, so profoundly embedded in a set of Western discourses, that we've created a vision of the world that shuts out a percentage of people in a way we can't really even begin to articulate?"...
For instance, the Korean electronics company LGE has introduced a mobile phone with an embedded compass to allow Muslim users to locate the direction of Mecca using Global Positioning System technology. Myung Whoon Lee, a senior LGE designer, said the company sought to design something "whose concept is reflected in the situation or culture of its actual place."