In Water Wars, Joshua Ortega discusses the issue of bottled water usage as having a negative impact on the consumer, environment and economy. The consumer would be affected because bottled water is often far less sanitary than tap water. Plastic used to manufacture the bottles is harmful to the environment, both in terms of production of the bottles and improper disposal after being used. Artificially created demand for bottled water could lead to the privatization of a countries water supply which would affect the price and quality of water in a negative way.
A common misconception is that bottled water is supposedly more sanitary than tap water. Bottled water companies use their advertising dollars to convince the consumers that because their water comes from a bottle, it has higher quality standards. In reality, as Ortega points out, there are actually fewer regulations on bottled water than tap water – at least in the United States. Part of the reason for this is because tap water is a public resource and data on the quality of the resource is available publicly. Private bottled water companies are not required to make sanitation data available to the public. (more…)

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Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men utilizes an unusual editing style to immerse the viewer in the world of the film and create a sense of reality that would ordinarily not exist in a traditional Hollywood movie. Long takes, and more specifically the absence of cuts, are used to achieve a documentary-like feel; action scenes which traditionally would have many fast paced shots and close ups are shown entirely through a single master shot. The use of a single shot advances the world of the film by maintaining an open frame throughout the movie. Where cuts are used they are carefully placed to create meaning between images that might not exist if the same scene were shown only through a master shot. All of the cinematic and editing choices in Children of Men come together to create a film about a world not too far off from our own in such a way that the viewer can connect with the world in a believable way.

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Through careful organization of story elements, the film Memento successfully helps the viewer to connect and sympathize with the main character, Leonard, who is suffering from an unusual memory condition that the viewer would not ordinarily be able to relate with. By seeing the story backwards, the viewer is unaware of events that have already taken place earlier in the story, much the way that Leonard is unable to remember them. Careful placement and movement of the camera throughout the film further connects the viewer with Leonard by showing the world from his point of view. Repetition of images and scenes also immerses the viewer in Leonard’s world by creating a sense of déjà-vu which causes the viewer to question what it might be like for Leonard to see the same thing repeatedly and not remember it. The entire plot structure of Memento is crucial to the success of the film because without it the viewer would be unable to understand the story on a personal level.

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 To play Warcraft III without a CD all you need to do is connect to battle.net and download the latest patch file. After that’s finished you will no longer need the CD to play!

Running Starcraft without the CD, unfortunately, is a bit more challenging. If you read the patch notes for patch 1152 then it explains how to do it, but since you didn’t I’ll explain it here…

If you have the Brood War expansion pack….

1. Insert your Brood War CD into your computer.
2. Navigate to the files on the CD and copy the file called “install.exe” to the starcraft program folder (this should be “C:\Program Files\Starcraft”)
3. Rename the file you just copied to be called “BroodWar.mpq” — note that you need to change the file extension from .exe to .mpq.
4. Remove the CD and play Starcraft without it!

If you do not have Brood War installed, simply follow the instructions above but when you copy “install.exe” from the CD you should rename it to “Starcraft.mpq”

Two months ago I signed up for a stamps.com account and figured I had nothing to lose and at the very least I’d get some free stuff. Sure enough, my account started off with $5 of free postage. Great! I was able to ship an item I had sold on eBay just fine. A few days later my free “stamps.com supply kit” arrived in the mail. This package included one sheet of 2 half page shipping labels, a sheet of odd sized labels, and a sheet of standard 0.41 cent sized labels (all of which could be printed on to from the stamps.com program). After using the software for a while I even bought some additional postage and shipped a few more items using their software.

So what about the scale? Well the scale isn’t actually free.  You need to pay shipping (roughly $6)  and even then it isn’t a great scale because the max weight is 5 lbs AND you need to connect it to your computer to read the weight from within the stamps.com program (forcing you to use their software if you want to use the scale).  I opted out of the “free” scale option. (more…)

This essay was written by Ben Cole.

Martin Luther and his 95 theses generated enormous controversy during the time of the Reformation. His idea of salvation through faith was vastly different from the view of the Catholic Church which started a great deal of dispute which would eventually become the cause of many great turning points in history, including the creation of different denominations of Christianity and the decline of the Roman Catholic Church.

As a young adult, Martin Luther searched for spiritual identity and worried about what would happen after he died. He attended Erfurt where he studied philosophy and classical literature. During his studies he narrowly escaped death during a thunder storm as he was traveling from Erfurt to Eisleben as lightning struck a tree near where he was standing. Fearing for his life, he vowed on the spot to become a monk saying, “Help me, dear St. Anna! I will become a monk.[1]“ On July 17, 1505 Martin Luther and his closest friends went with him to the Augustinian cloister where he left the world as he knew it to become a monk as he had promised[2].

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So you’re typing in a word document and everything you type seems to run right over the text in front of it — that is, instead of inserting more letters like you’re used to the computer erases an existing letter for every new letter you type. This is called “Overtype” and it’s an evil, evil feature that plagues windows computers. To disable the overtype mode, simply press the “Insert” button on your keyboard. To enable it, just press it again.

Note: Unlike the Caps Lock key, there is no light on your keyboard that will tell you if overtype is enabled or not. There is usually an indicator in your word document on the status bar that will say “OVR” if it is enabled.

More on overtype mode and the insert key can be found on Wikipedia here.

Read the article: http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html