technology Archive

3

Why Does a Nosy Computer Want to Ruin My Marriage?

By
Trevor Macomber
– May 31, 2012

There are many things about the corporate world that I’m forced to inhabit during normal business hours that regularly perplex and frighten me — for example, the tendency of its residents to use “spend” as a noun and “parking lot” as a verb. (E.g., Corporate Wonk 1:“What was our spend this quarter?” Corporate Wonk 2: “Let’s parking lot that discussion for another day.” Me: Baaaaaaaaaaarrrrrffff)

Occasionally, however, my experiences drift into a more metaphysical realm. Case in point: the existential crisis that arose after I finally remembered to update my emergency contact information yesterday following my marriage last year. As you can see, the first few text fields are fairly standard. However, after selecting how I was related to my emergency contact from a handy — and, I must, say, quite thorough — drop-down menu, I became genuinely stumped by the final piece of information requested: my “Relationship Start Date.”

Uhh, say what now? You want to know when my relationship with my emergency contact started? What does that even mean? If I had listed a parent, would my faceless overlords have wanted to know the day I was born, the day I was conceived, or the day I truly began to recognize my parents as flawed human beings who I could finally and legitimately consider peers? More importantly, would Virginia and Oklahoma require a personhood amendment to even be able to answer this question?

Of course, I didn’t list a parent. I listed a spouse, which makes the question even moreproblematic when you consider the possibility that, in the event of an emergency, whoever contacts her could conceivably share the information about when I believe our relationship started. Sure, I could just play it safe and list the date we met, but it would certainly be a stretch to say we had a relationship at that time. And since we were friends before any sort of romantic entanglement reared its snarled head, which phase of our relationship is more pertinent in this case: our fledgling friendship or consequent courtship? I suppose the former could be said to have begun the first time we hung out socially in any capacity, but the latter is a much trickier knot to unravel.

Did “she” and “I” become “us” the first time we danced together in a raging discotheque located beneath the local bullfighting arena? Were we “we” the moment she agreed to accompany me unchaperoned through the narrow, winding streets of the ancient Moorish barrio on the outskirts of town? Or perhaps the solidifying moment came during our unexpected, Lady-and-the-Tramp-style kiss over a mutually munched churro? (In case you’re confused, I should probably point out that we met in Spain.)

Then again, her relationship as my spouse obviously didn’t begin until the day we married, so maybe I should simply list our anniversary as the “Relationship Start Date.” Yeah, our anniversary, which is on…uhhh…I remember it was summer-ish…

On second thought, maybe I should just start looking both ways before I cross the hallway, since avoiding an emergency at work seems to be the only way to avoid a much bigger emergency at home.

0

Ditch the Electrical Umbilical

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 19, 2012

My wife and I ordered a new corner TV cabinet a few weeks back to replace the particleboard Walmart number we’d purchased after moving in together five years ago. Eager to ditch the college-quality eyesore, I began disconnecting components as soon as the new cabinet arrived and we managed to maneuver its wider-than-remembered bulk through the front door and into the kitchen.

Five minutes and one minor electrical shock later, I was greeted by this rather horrifying sight:

For those of you keeping track at home, this is apparently the sort of electro-intestinal carnage that one can expect from a years-long Royal Rumble starring, in no particular order, one high-definition television, one Nintendo Wii, one Blu-ray player, one satellite receiver, one Apple TV, one sound bar, one cable modem, one wireless router, and one high-definition signal switcher — that last device being necessary to manage the feeds from the aforementioned Blu-ray player, satellite receiver, and Apple TV in light of the single, solitaryHDMI input on our (relatively) old Westinghouse.

My first instinct upon witnessing this modern-day Cobble’s Knot was to hit up Maniac Mageeon the celly and then curl up in the fetal position while he worked his way through it with only the promise of a large cheese pizza for payment. After learning from my school-teacher wife that the book was not, in fact, based on a real person however, I eventually hunkered down to untangle the Gordian gnarl myself, wondering all the while when technology would finally free us from a tethered entertainment existence once and for all.

The most obvious candidate for wired obsolescence, of course, is the Blu-ray player (which would already require one less cord if I hadn’t cheaped out and purchased the ethernet-only version instead of the wireless one to access online content). In my opinion, there’s a better-than-even chance that Blu-ray discs will prove the last physical audio/video medium to gain widespread adoption, as more and more of us turn to Internet-enabled streaming media to meet our Hollywood hankerings.

Unfortunately, aside from pre-recorded movies offered by your cable or satellite provider, conventional bandwidth wisdom dictates that broadcast television is probably still a few years away from being able to pipe true 1080p resolution (at 60 fps — not 24 fps) directly into your living room — to say nothing of Ultra HD programming, which DIRECTV has just recently announced it is working on and which Japan intends to transition to by 2020 (the year — not the TV show).

Of course, once you ditch Blu-ray, cable/satellite doesn’t need to be far behind. As streaming content libraries at Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, and future competitors continue to grow, the concept of paying for dozens of channels that you never actually watch will become almost quaint. And while we’re consolidating, why not build TVs with wireless routers right in them? They’re already a prominently and centrally displayed piece of equipment, so Internet signals to your other connected devices shouldn’t suffer.

And if you can figure out a way to build a portal into the TV for third-party video game manufacturers, perhaps a single peripheral is all you’ll need to integrate their controllers as well, while the games themselves are delivered directly through your all-in-on uber-monitor. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the real Apple TV rumored to be debuting this fall incorporated multiple elements of my cord-free free-thinking.

[Googles…] Well, speak of the devil! (who, I might remind you, did convince Adam to partake of a certain doctor-repelling fruit once upon a time). According to Macworld UK two days ago, “Apple is working on a television set with voice-control and a touch-screen remote, which will come with Apple’s very own game console.” Well, applejacks! Now if they can only figure out how to power the whole thing via a giant Powermat, we’ll really be in business.

(crossposted on Motherboard)

0

Don’t be a Dick…unless you’ve got his watch

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 18, 2012

Dick_tracy_large

On January 13, 1946, Chester Gould gave Dick Tracy a two-way wrist radio and adolescent boys across the country became transfixed with the idea of miniature portable communication devices. In 1964, Gould upgraded Tracy’s radio to a two-way wrist TV, and our collective pubescent unconscious immediately began conjuring all sorts of filthy possibilities that continue to haunt our dreams to this day.

Early efforts to duplicate Tracy’s most iconic gadget were, how to put this… less than sophisticated.

Even employing Groucho Marx as a spokesmodel failed to satisfy our cravings for wrist-worn awesomeness.

Now fast forward to last Thursday for thedebut of Sony’s new ‘SmartWatch’, which is designed to work in tandem with your Android phone to provide you with more — ahem —timely access to the various and vital tweets, emails, status updates, phone calls, etc. that would otherwise force you to paw your phone out of your too-tight thrift store jeans every time your pocket buzzed.

Facing competition from Kickstarter darlingsPebble and inPulse and having just revised its losses for the previous financial year to $6.4 billion (yeah, that’s right — “billion”), Sony, the former consumer electronics giant, is undoubtedly praying for the SmartWatch to become as iconic as Tracy’s own well-known band of techno-bling — or, better yet, anything made by Apple in the last ten years.

However, whether or not the SmartWatch is a hit on its own merits, Sony certainly could have taken a bite out of Apple’s recipe book when it comes to advertising. As of today, there is absolutely no information about the SmartWatch on Sony’s homepage, forcing potential customers to glean second-hand information from sketchy-ass blogs.

Moreover, even typing “SmartWatch” into the main search bar yields zilch at the moment. It’s only when you click on the Sony Store and then search for “SmartWatch” that the product appears. Can you imagine visiting Apple.com at any given moment and not seeing a drool-worthy photo of the latest iPad or iPhone right on the front page?

On the plus side, Pottermore — the Harry Potter uber-site created and overseen by Just Kidding Rowling herself — opened last weekend, and since it’s apparently being run in partnership with top Sony brass like CEO Charlie Redmayne, CTO Julian Thomas, and COO Tom Turcan, maybe the boy wizard has enough tricks up his over-sized sleeves to turn the floundering federation’s fortunes around again. Don’t bet your last raven’s claw on it though. Vanquishing He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named was probably a hell of a lot easier than yanking Sony out of the scrap heap.

(crossposted on Motherboard)

0

Pape-plan, pape-plan, goin’ so fast

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 17, 2012

(crossposted on Motherboard)

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to spend hours inventing and constructing different paper airplane models in my basement during sleepovers. Sometimes we brought along the latest book of templates we’d convinced our parents to buy us during last month’s Scholastic book club order, but mostly the designs were our own. We experimented with paper size, material, and thickness; held contests to see who could invent the most and least complicated planes still capable of rudimentary flight; and then staged epic dogfights on the front lawn the next day that completely undermined all the preliminary aerodynamic conclusions we had drawn the night before in my wind-less, low-ceilinged cellar playroom.

I recall one particular optimism-inducing day when one of my parents brought home a thick roll of paper at least three feet wide that looked like it belonged on some sort of old-fashioned, room-sized receipt calculator. Our response was to make a paper airplane just about as tall as we were.

Unfortunately, after hours of carefully cutting, folding, and coloring the plane to make it as radical as a bunch of nine-year-olds could conceive of, its lackluster structural integrity ultimately forced us to admit defeat as sprinting launch after sprinting launch yielded nothing more than a crippled nose cone and approximately five feet of aggregate horizontal flight. It was the first of many times in our lives that we would learn that, despite what you hear on TV, size really does matter.

You’d have found that especially true if you were in the Arizona desert in March, when, according to the LA Times, the Pima Air & Space Museum used a helicopter to launch possibly the largest paper airplane ever constructed. The craft (aka, Arturo’s Desert Eagle) was 45 feet long with a 24-foot wingspan and weighed 800 pounds. It was constructed as part of the museum’s Giant Paper Airplane Project to excite kids about aviation and engineering.

Despite ascending to more than half a mile, the plane was able to remain aloft for no more than 10 seconds after its release from the tow cable. During that time, however, it reached a top speed of 98 miles per hour while covering nearly one mile across the ground before tragically accordioning into the cracked and arid landscape below. (No word yet on whether North Korea has called to discuss using the design for its next missile launch attempt.)

Half a mile is a hell of a drop point, but as a kid, I would have been psyched to have access to even a second-story window to toss our creations from — to say nothing of an 18th story window like the lucky (from the point of view of my adolescent avatar) Mumbai miscreant whose own homemade hang glider stars in the increasingly entrancing video below (via 3 Quarks Daily).

The cosmic beauty of this video isn’t that the airplane seems like an especially ingenious design (any wide-body glider constructed with even mild competence should be able to approach this much flight time given the heights and subsequent cross-winds involved), but the fact that anyone skipping ahead to the one-minute mark or so would probably be more likely — if they didn’t know any better — to label the swooping white object a clumsy bird rather than a man-made craft.

Best of all, the predatory raptors circling overhead seem to reach the same conclusion, considering how quickly they hone in on their unsuspecting papyrus prey before snatching it out of the sky during one of their sudden ascents.

Watching these bewildered buzzards, I began wondering what else was going on in the world of paper airplanes that no one had told me about and was pleasantly surprised when a quick Google search turned yet another significant event in the field.

On a smaller dimensional scale than Arturo’s Desert Eagle but a broader geopolitical one, May 4 and 5 will mark the third-ever Red Bull Paper Wings World Final in Salzburg, Austria, which has occurred every three years since 2006. The contest sees finalists compete in three distinct areas: Longest Distance (official World Record holder: Stephen Krieger [USA, 2003] with 207’ 4”), Longest Airtime (Takuo Toda [Japan, 2009] with 27.9 seconds), and Aerobatics (no world record, since winners are judged on creativity — e.g., Addison Asochak, who won the Canadian aerobatics finals by “dancing in western chaps while sending a dozen paper airplanes into the air during his one minute of competition time”).

Who knew that my youthful dalliances with paper-based aviation could have led to so many exciting opportunities if I’d stuck with it? I guess that should inspire me to continue with my current pursuit: paper furniture. If I could just solve this damn paper-cut problem, I might really have something here.

0

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 13, 2012

(crossposted on Motherboard)

iRobot’s line of autonomous Roomba vacuum cleaners has been extremely popular with both lazy (or, in some cases, lonely) homemakers and practical hackers alike ever since its debut in 2002. The former demographic loves its idiot-proof, Ron Popeil-esque “set it and forget it!” interface, while the latter loves its built-in array of high-tech sensors and “hackable” serial interface. In fact, programming the little vac-bot to perform non-cleaning tasks became so popular that, not only has it spawned various books and websites on the subject, it also inspired the company to relase the iRobot Create® Programmable Robot, in which the vacuum motor is replaced by an empty space for attaching whatever other instruments the user can dream up.

It really makes you wonder: What Would Rosie Do?

Not surprisingly, with the Roomba and its various companion/competitor technologies improving with each generation, local maid services have begun to realize that they might need to start stepping up their own game in order to compete in a mechanized world. Enter Texas’s own Lubbock Fantasy Maid Service, which offers “nude or topless maid services” to discerning patrons in the Lubbock area.

While most of the stories on the subject are focusing on the possible legal ramifications of this type of business operating without a “sexually oriented” permit, I think we can all agree that the more interesting angle comes on the “IMPORTANT INFORMATION!” link of Fantasy Maid’s website, where we learn that — despite being a literally half-assed idea — the company has actually thought this thing through quite a bit, to the extent that they even have a comprehensive policy for how to deal with any nudists who hire them.

To wit:

NUDIST POLICY: LFMS will provide services in the homes of nudist [sic] under certain circumstances. If the nudist answers the door nude AND has immediate family (mixed gender) present (clothed or nude) then the customer may also be nude. The relation must be provable by identification and the family members must be clearly visible upon opening the door.

As much as a publicity stunt as it is, we ought to applaud Fantasy Maid for showing that, in the coming struggle between cold, hard robots and living flesh, humans still have a chance.

1

What a Rube!

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 12, 2012

(cross-posted on Motherboard)

When you spend six months and 5,000 hours perfecting a 300-step, Guinness Record-breaking Rube Goldberg contraption, it’s gotta be a bummer to come in second place to some wimpy-ass 191-step machine simply because you had to intervene by hand a couple times when a ball failed to drop or a lever refused to swing correctly during the officially timed test run.

Fortunately, the handy too-much-time-on-their-hand-ers from Purdue University managed to record a successful start-to-finish run of their massive mechanical masterpiece at some point during the process. Unfortunately, the video looks like it was filmed by the crew of The Blair Witch project, but I guess there’s not a lot of crossover between engineering nerds and film school nerds these days, so I’ll give them a pass this time.

As you can see, the incredibly intricate machine is…well, hard to see. Which is to say, there’s just no way to appreciate its mind-blowing complexity in a mere two dimensions on low-resolution shaky-cam video. Although the ultimate goal of the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest this year was merely to inflate and pop a balloon, the team overachieved by also incorporating all 24 required tasks from prior years of the contest.

“My rule is to tell an intricate story and make people laugh, and have people sit down and go, ‘Wow!’” [team president Zach] Umperovitch told Wired. “Since it was the [competition’s] 25th anniversary, I thought, ‘Why don’t we have a machine that does it all?’”

And it does indeed do it all. According to Umperovitch, in addition to successfully bursting said rubber bubble (that’s another term for balloon, right?), the Purdue team’s 2012 contraption also incorporated discrete steps for mailing a letter, sharpening a pencil, closing a jar, toasting a slice of bread, unlocking a padlock, screwing in a lightbulb (Q: How many Purdue engineering students does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: Apparently at least a dozen — assuming they have 5,000 hours or so to spare.), making coffee, turning on a radio, putting coins in a bank, playing a CD, shutting off an alarm clock, putting a golf ball, creating a time capsule, peeling an apple, raising a flag, recycling a can, casting a ballot, turning on a flashlight, shredding paper, squeezing orange juice, making a hamburger, replacing a lightbulb, dispensing hand sanitizer, and watering a plant.

Despite repeated viewings, I’m still not totally sure if I’ve caught the padlock cracking, coffee making, ballot casting, paper shredding, or hand sanitizing phases, so if anyone can give me a time stamp and/or viewing quadrant for these steps…well, then you clearly have too much time on your hands, too.

That said, there’s something beautifully and depressingly poetic about investing so much time and effort to design and build a device whose sole purpose is to destroy in its last act the very thing it creates in its second-to-last act. If only they would have turned their attentions to a machine that could have resulted in Rick Santorum winning the Republican nomination for president. Now that would have been an entertaining, confusing waste of time!

0

Insta-DAMN, that’s a lotta money!

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 9, 2012

According to the LA Times and numerous other venues,

Facebook has agreed to buy the hugely popular photo-sharing site Instagram for about $1 billion in cash and stock in a blockbuster deal reverberating around Silicon Valley.

Now, my current phone is no smarter than a box of rocks, so I have yet to experience the first-hand appeal of a photo-taking app that lets you visually tweak your shots before sharing them in order to make them look even more unprofessional than before, but one BEEEELYUN dollars is a fuck of a lot of insta-green for a two-year-old company with approximately one dozen (!) employees and no readily apparent way to monetize. (Hell, they even give the app away for free.)

If Facebook stays true to form, it’s likely to continue offering the product for free. However, if Zuck and Co. plan to recoup some of that investment, I wonder if they’d ever adopt a freemium model by continuing to allow users to download and use the app for free up until a certain number of photos have been taken. Then power users would have to pony up (a totally reasonable amount for a product they like and use frequently) if they want to go over their quota for the month.

Just a thought while I continue to develop my own free app, InstaJunk, which allows you to take a picture of someone’s crotch region and then superimposes an imaginary-yet-highly-detailed rendering of their genitals on the outside of their pants before uploading.

0

Eyes on the Prize

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 6, 2012

Oh technology, is there any way you can’t make us look stupid? First you tricked us into believing that rolling over a relatively smooth surface was more efficient than upright bipedalism (wheels! amirite???). Then, a few years later, crazy folks lost their monopoly on talking to themselves in public when some Smurf-obsessed nerd invented the bluetooth and it began to proliferate among business-types and young people — two truly dismal demographics which, to this day, can be seen having extensive, passionate conversations about the stock market and/or their latest STDs with interested dust motes and subway posters.

Now, entering into this startlingly fractured technoscape for the first time is none other than that erstwhile manufacturer of Happy Days-themed car fresheners and body-shaping undergarments for older women, The Google.

From Reuters yesterday:

Google Inc is getting into the eyewear business with a pair of thin wraparound shades that puts the company’s Web services in your face.

The experimental “augmented reality” glasses – from the same team that is developing self-driven cars – can snap photos, initiate videochats and display directions at the sound of a user’s voice.

The prototype digital glasses, unveiled on the company’s Google+ social network on Wednesday, are still being tweaked and tested, and are not available in stores yet.

Here’s a (presumably After Effects’d) videographic demonstrating what Google Goggles could one day do for you:

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this actually seems pretty cool — assuming, of course, you don’t fall through an open manhole while you’re wearing them. And of course, in this day of instant high-production-value witticism, one tech-savvy wag who I wish was me has already created a commendably tongue-in-cheek riposte:

On second thought, maybe I’ll save my money for Google Contacts.

1

Big Brother to the…rescue?

By
Trevor Macomber
– April 3, 2012

I’m currently stuck at the dealership while my car undergoes its regularly scheduled 7,500 mile maintenance service. Because I couldn’t figure out how to connect to their ridiculously obtuse wifi setup, I ended up hooking into an unsecured network with the inspired name of “NETGEAR 2.” After logging into Gmail, WordPress, and Facebook, respectively, I thought I’d check out the headlines over at Slate and pointed my browser in their direction.

That’s when I was greeted by the following confounding message:

“The Websense category ‘News and Media’ is filtered.” Where the hell are we: Soviet Russia? Communist China? Hippogriff Fakesylvania? And what’s the sense in blocking a website like Slate but leaving the mother of time suckers, Facebook, completely accessible? Also, if this is a local business using an off-the-shelf web filter to enforce employee productivity, why is the wireless network unsecured? Seems like corporate security one-oh-one. The whole thing is blowing my mind, quite frankly.

…Ooh, but at least my car’s ready!

0

An Apple a day…makes your gray matter decay?

By
Trevor Macomber
– March 26, 2012

Let me preempt this post (ontological question: is something really preemptive if it’s the first sentence in an essay, or is it merely introductory? Oh well…) by assuring you that I’m not writing it from my front porch while lording over an ever-growing collection of kites, soccer balls, and frisbees as I yell at the neighborhood kids to get the hell off my lawn.

That said, here’s another assurance: your two-year-old needs an iPad about as much as you need a diaper. (Which is to say, sure, it might be a treat once in a while, but let’s not go all Lisa Nowak here, okay?)

From MSN Money the other day:

Three years ago, when he was just 2 years old, Max Fuller got his first iPhone. His father, Craig Fuller, the CEO of a banking technology company, said it’s been an “enormous tool” for teaching Max the basics about colors, shapes and letters, and most recently the names of all of the dinosaurs and how they lived.

Okay, yeah, sure — education, innovation, keep up with the times, Trevor the Troglodyte. Obviously, you’ve missed the trend train and are attempting to analyze the current state of affairs from the engine fumes-engulfed platform of your pump-action handcar:

According to data gathered from September to December 2011 by global strategic marketing agencyKids Industries, 20% of children ages 3 to 8 own their own iPod touch, while 24% of U.S. children in this age group own their own iPad and 8% own their own iPhone. For teens, the numbers are considerably higher. An April 2011 survey conducted by financial adviser firm Piper Jaffray found that 80% of U.S. teenagers owned a type of mp3 player, with the iPod by far the most common, 17% owned an iPhone (38% expected to buy one in the ensuing six months), and 29% owned or had access at home to a tablet device (and 22% said they expected to buy an iPad in the ensuing six months).

Which is all well and good for Apple investors, but perhaps not so keen for early (as in, pre-pre-pre-teen) adopters:

According to many experts, so much screen time can have permanent effects on the brain. The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages any media use by children younger than 2. Dr. David Hill, a member of American Association of Pediatrics’ Council on Communications and the Media and the author of the forthcoming book “Dad to Dad: Parenting Like a Pro,” agrees and recommends that any child over the age of 2 limit screen time to two hours a day.

“Evidence suggests that viewing the sorts of rapid fire images present in videos or video games can lead to future problems in children’s ability to concentrate,” he says, adding that some research suggests a strong link between media exposure and ADHD. He says problems are likely to surface when the device is used as a substitute for communication between parent and child.

[...]

Jane M. Healy, an educational psychologist who specializes in the effect of computer technology on growing brains and the author of “Different Learners: Identifying, Preventing and Treating Your Child’s Learning Problems,” says technology offers no benefits to young children.

“All indications are that instead of increasing their intelligence, it’s going to dull it down,” she says. What’s most important for a young child’s brain development is participating in conversation, a skill that children preoccupied with an iPad, cellphone or computer fail to practice, she says. “It’s language that will later help them become physicists, scientists and imaginative computer programmers.”

Again, this isn’t a screed against a harried parent handing their screaming toddler their touchscreen-enabled smartphone to quiet him down at the mall or in a restaurant; it’s a screed against anyone who would use such technology to outright replace time that they would have otherwise spent interacting with thetreasured fruit (Apple, in most cases) of their loins. Of course, that’s only half the issue, because while it’s one thing to let your kid use your fancy-ass future gizmo once in a while, it’s another thing entirely to give him one of his own — and not because you might spoil him (though there is that), but because you might literally and permanently reconfigure his brain chemistry for the worse.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like I wouldn’t have killed for the latest interactive miniaturized gadget as soon as I was old enough to start requesting Disney movies by name, but the fact that I didn’t have ready access to pre-canned digital entertainment meant that I spent most of my youth careening through the unlimited confines of that wonderously weighty buzzword, IMAGINATION.

If I’d owned an iPad, do you think I would have spent the majority of my free time running around outdoors or reading piles of books animated in proprietary HD (head-defined) ImagiVision? Shit no! I’d have been hunkered down on the couch with a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos one one side and a bottle of Cran-Raspberry juice on the other, alternating my time between the latest YouTube sensation and marathon battles spent launching  disgruntled fowl at ravenous porkers into the wee hours of the morning.

So yes, this is an “everything in moderation” rant, but I think it’s an important one. Because while it’s absolutely true that, with

an increasingly technology-focused society and economy…exposure to technology, no matter how early, will only help children develop into the tech-savvy adults the country needs[,]

it’s also true that hundreds of people die of exposure each year. (Yeah, I went there.) So, Mr. Fuller, next time you want to teach your kid about colors and letters, why not try Dr. Seuss? And if he wants to learn about dinosaurs, I bet he’d love the ones in a museum even more than the ones on the tiny screen in his hand. Because there’s always going to be time for him to get his Retina Display on, but once those vital synapses and cerebral crennelations begin to solidify, there’s literally no going back. Then it won’t matter how many apples a day you feed him.

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