This excuse already exists. I run a help desk for a LMS at a university, and I hear this pretty much non-stop from students. It's the new "the dog ate my homework".

If you're a long distance from a beach, you're doing it wrong.

Dude, you're doing it wrong.

Minecraft is a sandbox type game where you can build stuff out of the environment. It has no scripting or math functions built in, nor does it really have any sort of logic gates built in. However, it does something called "redstone dust" which you can use as wires. The wiki explains more, but you can hand-craft logic gates out of it: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Redstone_Dust

The average user doesn't want to become us. They want to get stuff done and not have to think about the underlying application or hardware or even HOW they are getting their tasks accomplished.

I have both lines of my cell phone account on the DNC list. Just because it's a cell phone doesn't mean you can't list your number on DNC.

The company's called rapiscan. I use the pun all the time when flying, guess it doesn't come across well in text.

I mean, there is this (emphasis mine):

But aside from that, and perhaps it's my unfamiliarity with the proposal, I don't see any indication that this is trying to end the practice of treating everyone like a criminal.

CTRL-L or Command-L on a mac. They aren't getting rid of the URL bar, they are simply hiding it by default. I'm going to assume that similar to the tabs on top thing in Firefox4, there will most likely be a configuration you can change to show it by default.

We're piloting putting OO.org on our thin clients in a computer lab we manage at SF State (California). The thin clients have four things on them, total: Firefox, Chrome, IE, and OO.org. Everything else can be used via remote desktop, but we rarely get anyone who needs anything other than a browser and open office.

http://www.google.com/newproducts/ has a list of all of the google products out there, and even lets you filter by area of interest or search.

San Francisco is a bit of a bubble, politically. There are things that happen here that would not fly anywhere else in the state.

The Wii has parental controls, and the way they handle multiplayer online stuff anyway, there is pretty much no way for people to contact other people using the Wii online.