It may well be wishful thinking amoungst the Linux faithful but there is a growing impatience with the endless Microsoft upgrade cycle.
This is a real effect but the magnitude of it is vastly overstated by wishful thinkers. The costs and problems of Vista will drive a few people and organizations to Linux or OS X but only a very few. Most will suck it up and wait for the MS to patch away the worst of the problems and start rolling it out on the next upgrade cycle. The more conservative ones will just stay with XP as long as possible.
I won't pretend to understand either the math or the physics involved but the following page has an EPS/PDF rendition of the E8 shape. It's fun to watch gv draw it. Acroread will render the PDF but it is slower than gv rendering the eps. Actually, now that I try it, gv is fast rendering either. Poppler based pdf readers seem to choke on it.
Hanford was started as a facility to produce weapons fuel and has been around since WWII. I'm sure it's been upgraded and maintained in bits and pieces but this started out as inefficient and dirty first generation technology. A lot of the waste you mention has probably been around since the 40s too. The answer is to reprocess as much of that waste as possible and store the rest of it in Nevada. Overblown proliferation fears prevent the reprocessing which would lessen both the amount of waste and the amount of time it is deadly as well as making nuclear power more efficient overall. Everything possible has been done to make storage of the remaining waste as expensive and politically contentious as possible. As for your operating temperatures, the US is 20 to 30 years behind on nuclear power tech and it is getting worse. France is a net exporter of electricity and they are mostly nuclear. It seems that up-to-date nuclear tech is efficient and competitive enough.
Ahab the Ay-Rab and the emissions from burning coal and oil are worse. Filled up a car lately? We're getting our backs put to the wall and we should have learned from the taste of it we got in the early Seventies. Instead, we let the tasty combination of Big Oil, Big Coal, and Yogurt Sucking Hippies set us up for the current situation. Granted, Shrubba-Dubya and his Band of Merry Men made it happen 5 or 10 years sooner than it should have but it was going to happen nonetheless. Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, and various forms of biofuels will help but they won't even begin to fill the holes in our energy budget. Burning a shitload of coal will but that is a bigger public health and environmental disaster than a few thousand tons of relatively short-lived reprocessed waste buried out in the desert.
I'm sure everything would be peachy keen if this was fantasy land and we could burn pretty flowers in our cars and power plants to make MoonBeam Power to run everything. It isn't. This is the real world. There are indeed things that are shitty about nuclear power but not developing it is worse.
You can't "gloss over" the disposal issue but we do some severely ass-headed things that make it more of problem. Much of the waste can be reprocessed into fissile fuel. Yes, that fuel is apt for conversion to weapons but we are already a nuclear power and have means of accounting for it. The residue that is left after reprocessing is even more intensely radioactive but that means a shorter half-life which means it isn't dangerous for as long. Hell, I say build the reprocessing plant directly on top of the salt mine, and immediately cook the hell out of and bury what can't be used again.
The yogurt-sucking hippie protesters can be thrown down the mine too. They're a bigger waste than a pile of radionuclides.
We already invite geopolitical dangers and environmental dangers from our over dependence on fossil fuels. Stacked up next to those, is a well-designed and run nuclear infrastructure any worse? I don't think so.
And yes, I'd take a nuclear plant in MY backyard. I filled up my car today and my ring feels stretched out more than ever. We can let the nimbies keep the yogurt suckers company down in the mineshaft.
Let me try to define a good outcome, or "win" for Iraq though: A country with a democratic government, life expectancy and death rate as verified by the medical community to be in the range of a peaceful country, without the need to station massive amounts of foreign troops in Iraq.
That is something that is barely possible at best. Oh well, at least it is possible. I fear however there are unstated conditions in your "good outcome". One of those is "and is also friendly to the United States and Saudi Arabia as well as their interests". If THAT is insisted on then something else is going to have to give starting with the the "democratic" part. Whatever candidates dislike the US the most will win by landslides. I also suspect that tribal, sectarian, and ethnic rivalries are too severe to allow any sort of civic feelings toward a nation of Iraq as whole. Saddam blatantly favored the interests of his fellow Sunni tribesman and squashed anyone that had the temerity to complain. If a "unified Iraq" is also an unstated condition, that will have to go as well.
A certain base level of intelligence precludes many other forms of adaptation. Our current level of intelligence allows a subtropical adapted species to live inside the Arctic circle and it's been done for thousands of years. There are things nature can still throw at us like asteroid strikes and megavolcanoes but up to a certain level all those can do is "end civilization as we know it" not "exterminate humanity". Adaptation can only take place in response to unfriendly conditions that would otherwise make life difficult or impossible. There isn't much nature can do to force changes in our minds and bodies. I don't want to sound like a "transhumanist" but we are slowly gaining the ability to direct future morphological developments and even today we can do a lot with prosthesis. Any future adaptations will be by our choice.
Come to think it, the fossilized human in question was surviving in a fairly hostile environment. This alone means comparable intelligence to humans living today.
First we got the bomb, and that was good 'Cause we love peace and motherhood Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay 'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way Who's next
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve 'Cause they're on our side, I believe China got the bomb, but have no fears They can't wipe us out for at least five years Who's next
Then Indonesia claimed that they Were gonna get one any day South Africa wants two, that's right One for the black and one for the white Who's next
Egypt's gonna get one too Just to use on you know who So Israel's getting tense Wants one in self defense "The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm But just in case, we better get a bomb Who's next
Luxembourg is next to go And, who knows, maybe Monaco We'll try to stay serene and calm When Alabama gets the bomb Who's next, who's next, who's next, who's next
Bush learned from a drubbing he took in a 1978 Congressional election. His Democratic opponent painted him as an over intellectual rich college boy. He was more or less in Kerry's position in that election. I believe him to be the most incompetent and corrupt President we've had since Grant unless of course he was specifically installed to help his Dad's buddies pillage the Treasury. If that is the case (which wouldn't surprise me) then what we actually have is very foxy character; his would merely be the most corrupt Administration in that case. Nonetheless, I don't think he is stupid. A lousy president, yes this is a man who simply doesn't give a shit for anyone not in his circle of family, friends, and business associates. Stupid, no and that is deliberate on his part to cause others to underestimate him.
I don't think that was what the parent was getting at. He was saying that MS' software development is so micromanaged that 1000 lines a year is all anyone can manage to productively knock out. They aren't being lazy, they're spending all that time filling out TPS Reports.
I don't know about that. I see quite a bit of "If you aren't using/supporting/whatever ProTools then it isn't professional..." type posts when the subject of audio apps comes up around here.
When I was a kid and we had a toy break in a really lame way we'd say it was "K-Mart Fall Apart". When it comes to cheesy crap at a cheap price Wal-Mart makes K-Mart look like a bunch of pikers. I remember a few years back that Snapper pulled their mowers out of Wal-Mart rather than cheap out on quality and put the Snapper logo on it. They seemed to feel that it would hurt their reputation for building pricey mowers that were worth every penny.
The only things I ever buy from a Wal-Mart are boxed and canned goods and things like trash bags. Even then, I find the quality and freshness to be suspect. We made the mistake of buying some steaks from Wal-Mart once. It tasted like freezer-burned roadkill. I wouldn't give Wal-Mart meat to a dog. And don't get me started on the fellow customers you meet in one......
Or just turn places like theatres into giant Faraday cages and put up prominent notices to that effect. I don't believe the FCC forbids passive means of shielding signals from entering or leaving. The last time I went to a movie some asshole got four or five calls and I basically had to threaten to turn the thing into a suppository before they turned it off.
Shielded restaurants and theatres would gain more than they lose. I'd go to such places preferentially because I can eat and be entertained in peace. Yes, assholes may be a minority but it only takes one to ruin an experience for a multitude.
You can still buy the big solid KitchenAid mixers and those getting serious about cooking can still get them or something equivalent. And they do sport a power socket that takes any number of effective attachments.
I suspect those who stay serious about computing will still be able to buy general purpose machines but they'll be more of a niche item for those know about and need them.
The problem is that the mobile communications market in this country is still cranially-rectally inverted. If I get pissed at AT&T and want another provider then I also lose my email and music machine. I also lose any other function this expensive multifunction device provided me. Any device like the iPhone will have to at least approach the PC in terms of openness and be transferable to other service providers with a minimum of hassle before I'll look at it. And I don't buy that crap about open phones lousing up cell networks. Isolate the phone functionality and only provide API hooks to do things like "dial number" or "wait for ring". Furthermore, I'm not paying 6 bucks apiece for ring tones and I'm not paying 50 bucks apiece for stripped down "mobile" versions of apps. They don't want phones to work like the internet, they want future computers to work the way Ma Bell intends. Screw that noise.
As long as the cell phone market works the way it does then I'll only use a cheap minimal cell phone for one thing and one thing only: making and taking calls.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt.45 and a.38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
That quality you notice isn't inherent to the package manager. Debian would be just as good if it were based on rpm. Debian is quite anal about packages and their dependencies and good mirrors for same. This is the base that makes the Debian derived distros so good.
If rpm based distros took just as care with viewing packages-as-a-unified system (and maybe some do) then they'd be as kind to you.
I've never seen any reason for Apple to disallow virtualization on their own hardware. There's been times I could have used it myself. I used to run Linux on a Pismo Powerbook and used MOL for those times I needed OS X. It ran really well too. But no soap doing that with an Intel Mac. It just takes hooks so that even a virtual OS X can make the Apple hardware checks. They really need to extend this to the client OSes as well. I have and like an Intel MacBook but would rather mimic my old Pismo setup. It isn't an option currently and no I don't want a VMWare hackintosh under Linux I like things like Software Update working correctly.
In house Software Update for one. I have one copy of OS X Server installed on a machine for that. Even though I happily serve Macs reliably and affordably with Linux, OS X Server is pretty much turnkey for serving Macs and makes an OK server for Windows. Correctly configured, Linux (or a BSD) can mimic OS X Server (minus the update server) but it isn't all that easy getting there.
Measuring them with a big ass diamond stylus will be more than enough disruption to "collapse the wave function". Mechanical styli hit their limits long before we have to get quantum mechanical on their asses.
Slashdot Mirror
It may well be wishful thinking amoungst the Linux faithful but there is a growing impatience with the endless Microsoft upgrade cycle.
This is a real effect but the magnitude of it is vastly overstated by wishful thinkers. The costs and problems of Vista will drive a few people and organizations to Linux or OS X but only a very few. Most will suck it up and wait for the MS to patch away the worst of the problems and start rolling it out on the next upgrade cycle. The more conservative ones will just stay with XP as long as possible.I won't pretend to understand either the math or the physics involved but the following page has an EPS/PDF rendition of the E8 shape. It's fun to watch gv draw it. Acroread will render the PDF but it is slower than gv rendering the eps. Actually, now that I try it, gv is fast rendering either. Poppler based pdf readers seem to choke on it.
http://aimath.org/E8/mcmullen.html
Hanford was started as a facility to produce weapons fuel and has been around since WWII. I'm sure it's been upgraded and maintained in bits and pieces but this started out as inefficient and dirty first generation technology. A lot of the waste you mention has probably been around since the 40s too. The answer is to reprocess as much of that waste as possible and store the rest of it in Nevada. Overblown proliferation fears prevent the reprocessing which would lessen both the amount of waste and the amount of time it is deadly as well as making nuclear power more efficient overall. Everything possible has been done to make storage of the remaining waste as expensive and politically contentious as possible. As for your operating temperatures, the US is 20 to 30 years behind on nuclear power tech and it is getting worse. France is a net exporter of electricity and they are mostly nuclear. It seems that up-to-date nuclear tech is efficient and competitive enough.
Ahab the Ay-Rab and the emissions from burning coal and oil are worse. Filled up a car lately? We're getting our backs put to the wall and we should have learned from the taste of it we got in the early Seventies. Instead, we let the tasty combination of Big Oil, Big Coal, and Yogurt Sucking Hippies set us up for the current situation. Granted, Shrubba-Dubya and his Band of Merry Men made it happen 5 or 10 years sooner than it should have but it was going to happen nonetheless. Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, and various forms of biofuels will help but they won't even begin to fill the holes in our energy budget. Burning a shitload of coal will but that is a bigger public health and environmental disaster than a few thousand tons of relatively short-lived reprocessed waste buried out in the desert.
I'm sure everything would be peachy keen if this was fantasy land and we could burn pretty flowers in our cars and power plants to make MoonBeam Power to run everything. It isn't. This is the real world. There are indeed things that are shitty about nuclear power but not developing it is worse.
You can't "gloss over" the disposal issue but we do some severely ass-headed things that make it more of problem. Much of the waste can be reprocessed into fissile fuel. Yes, that fuel is apt for conversion to weapons but we are already a nuclear power and have means of accounting for it. The residue that is left after reprocessing is even more intensely radioactive but that means a shorter half-life which means it isn't dangerous for as long. Hell, I say build the reprocessing plant directly on top of the salt mine, and immediately cook the hell out of and bury what can't be used again.
The yogurt-sucking hippie protesters can be thrown down the mine too. They're a bigger waste than a pile of radionuclides.
We already invite geopolitical dangers and environmental dangers from our over dependence on fossil fuels. Stacked up next to those, is a well-designed and run nuclear infrastructure any worse? I don't think so.
And yes, I'd take a nuclear plant in MY backyard. I filled up my car today and my ring feels stretched out more than ever. We can let the nimbies keep the yogurt suckers company down in the mineshaft.
Let me try to define a good outcome, or "win" for Iraq though: A country with a democratic government, life expectancy and death rate as verified by the medical community to be in the range of a peaceful country, without the need to station massive amounts of foreign troops in Iraq.
That is something that is barely possible at best. Oh well, at least it is possible. I fear however there are unstated conditions in your "good outcome". One of those is "and is also friendly to the United States and Saudi Arabia as well as their interests". If THAT is insisted on then something else is going to have to give starting with the the "democratic" part. Whatever candidates dislike the US the most will win by landslides. I also suspect that tribal, sectarian, and ethnic rivalries are too severe to allow any sort of civic feelings toward a nation of Iraq as whole. Saddam blatantly favored the interests of his fellow Sunni tribesman and squashed anyone that had the temerity to complain. If a "unified Iraq" is also an unstated condition, that will have to go as well.A certain base level of intelligence precludes many other forms of adaptation. Our current level of intelligence allows a subtropical adapted species to live inside the Arctic circle and it's been done for thousands of years. There are things nature can still throw at us like asteroid strikes and megavolcanoes but up to a certain level all those can do is "end civilization as we know it" not "exterminate humanity". Adaptation can only take place in response to unfriendly conditions that would otherwise make life difficult or impossible. There isn't much nature can do to force changes in our minds and bodies. I don't want to sound like a "transhumanist" but we are slowly gaining the ability to direct future morphological developments and even today we can do a lot with prosthesis. Any future adaptations will be by our choice. Come to think it, the fossilized human in question was surviving in a fairly hostile environment. This alone means comparable intelligence to humans living today.
What? The GPL does NOT prohibit forking. There are dynamics associated with it that tend to discourage forking but it certainly is not prohibited.
ARTIST: Tom Lehrer
TITLE: Who's Next
First we got the bomb, and that was good
'Cause we love peace and motherhood
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's okay
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way
Who's next
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve
'Cause they're on our side, I believe
China got the bomb, but have no fears
They can't wipe us out for at least five years
Who's next
Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day
South Africa wants two, that's right
One for the black and one for the white
Who's next
Egypt's gonna get one too
Just to use on you know who
So Israel's getting tense
Wants one in self defense
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm
But just in case, we better get a bomb
Who's next
Luxembourg is next to go
And, who knows, maybe Monaco
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb
Who's next, who's next, who's next, who's next
Bush learned from a drubbing he took in a 1978 Congressional election. His Democratic opponent painted him as an over intellectual rich college boy. He was more or less in Kerry's position in that election. I believe him to be the most incompetent and corrupt President we've had since Grant unless of course he was specifically installed to help his Dad's buddies pillage the Treasury. If that is the case (which wouldn't surprise me) then what we actually have is very foxy character; his would merely be the most corrupt Administration in that case. Nonetheless, I don't think he is stupid. A lousy president, yes this is a man who simply doesn't give a shit for anyone not in his circle of family, friends, and business associates. Stupid, no and that is deliberate on his part to cause others to underestimate him.
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/presidents/george-w-bush/
Your real argument is with the GP post. I was just clarifying what I thought the original post was getting at.
I don't think that was what the parent was getting at. He was saying that MS' software development is so micromanaged that 1000 lines a year is all anyone can manage to productively knock out. They aren't being lazy, they're spending all that time filling out TPS Reports.
I don't know about that. I see quite a bit of "If you aren't using/supporting/whatever ProTools then it isn't professional..." type posts when the subject of audio apps comes up around here.
When I was a kid and we had a toy break in a really lame way we'd say it was "K-Mart Fall Apart". When it comes to cheesy crap at a cheap price Wal-Mart makes K-Mart look like a bunch of pikers. I remember a few years back that Snapper pulled their mowers out of Wal-Mart rather than cheap out on quality and put the Snapper logo on it. They seemed to feel that it would hurt their reputation for building pricey mowers that were worth every penny.
The only things I ever buy from a Wal-Mart are boxed and canned goods and things like trash bags. Even then, I find the quality and freshness to be suspect. We made the mistake of buying some steaks from Wal-Mart once. It tasted like freezer-burned roadkill. I wouldn't give Wal-Mart meat to a dog. And don't get me started on the fellow customers you meet in one......
Or just turn places like theatres into giant Faraday cages and put up prominent notices to that effect. I don't believe the FCC forbids passive means of shielding signals from entering or leaving. The last time I went to a movie some asshole got four or five calls and I basically had to threaten to turn the thing into a suppository before they turned it off.
Shielded restaurants and theatres would gain more than they lose. I'd go to such places preferentially because I can eat and be entertained in peace. Yes, assholes may be a minority but it only takes one to ruin an experience for a multitude.
You can still buy the big solid KitchenAid mixers and those getting serious about cooking can still get them or something equivalent. And they do sport a power socket that takes any number of effective attachments.
I suspect those who stay serious about computing will still be able to buy general purpose machines but they'll be more of a niche item for those know about and need them.
The problem is that the mobile communications market in this country is still cranially-rectally inverted. If I get pissed at AT&T and want another provider then I also lose my email and music machine. I also lose any other function this expensive multifunction device provided me. Any device like the iPhone will have to at least approach the PC in terms of openness and be transferable to other service providers with a minimum of hassle before I'll look at it. And I don't buy that crap about open phones lousing up cell networks. Isolate the phone functionality and only provide API hooks to do things like "dial number" or "wait for ring". Furthermore, I'm not paying 6 bucks apiece for ring tones and I'm not paying 50 bucks apiece for stripped down "mobile" versions of apps. They don't want phones to work like the internet, they want future computers to work the way Ma Bell intends. Screw that noise.
As long as the cell phone market works the way it does then I'll only use a cheap minimal cell phone for one thing and one thing only: making and taking calls.
I forgot to set it from "HTML Formatted" to "Plain Old Text" but then again it seems even more appropriately nutty that way.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!) Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
It sounds like the premise of the next Bond flick: MoonRaper.
That quality you notice isn't inherent to the package manager. Debian would be just as good if it were based on rpm. Debian is quite anal about packages and their
dependencies and good mirrors for same. This is the base that makes the Debian derived distros so good.
If rpm based distros took just as care with viewing packages-as-a-unified system (and maybe some do) then they'd be as kind to you.
Here's a hint: Only "dimwitted juvenile punks" use such language in response to polite reasoned posts.
I think that's Lemonparty you were thinking of.....
I've never seen any reason for Apple to disallow virtualization on their own hardware. There's been times I could have used it myself. I used to run Linux on a Pismo Powerbook and used MOL for those times I needed OS X. It ran really well too. But no soap doing that with an Intel Mac. It just takes hooks so that even a virtual OS X can make the Apple hardware checks. They really need to extend this to the client OSes as well. I have and like an Intel MacBook but would rather mimic my old Pismo setup. It isn't an option currently and no I don't want a VMWare hackintosh under Linux I like things like Software Update working correctly.
In house Software Update for one. I have one copy of OS X Server installed on a machine for that. Even though I happily serve Macs reliably and affordably with Linux, OS X Server is pretty much turnkey for serving Macs and makes an OK server for Windows. Correctly configured, Linux (or a BSD) can mimic OS X Server (minus the update server) but it isn't all that easy getting there.
Measuring them with a big ass diamond stylus will be more than enough disruption to "collapse the wave function". Mechanical styli hit their limits long before we have to get quantum mechanical on their asses.