I agree with the general sentiment in your post, but I think long car trips are something of a special case. Kids can get extremely antsy, and car trips longer than about 2 hours can start really start taking a toll. It's just not reasonable to expect people to carry on a 3 hour conversation with their 4 year old. Hell, I don't think there are many adults I'd want to talk to for 3 hours at a stretch, which is why my car has a CD player.
I suppose the better alternative is to avoid long trips where possible, but sometimes it's unavoidable, or sometimes the benefits outweigh the negatives. So I agree that one should not use TV as a babysitter at home, but on trips longer than a couple hours, I see no problem.
I quite agree, I loved Data. You've nailed most of it, the characters ae meant to fulfill certain roles. After all, Gene's original intent for Star Trek was to make a show like Gulliver's Travels, where he could deal with moral issues without being told his plots are to deep, or will make the audience uncomfortable. Data is a useful tool to accomplish that goal, and making him a realistic android would be an impediment, just as trying to have realistic aliens would be an impediment. The half black/half white faced people, for example, I can say for certain right now, do not exist anywhere in the universe. But they were good for dealing with racism on the original series.
Also, another reason Spock was promoted to second in command is that the producers didn't feel that the fact that Gene was having an affair with Majel Barret was enough of a reason to give her a leading role. Let's face it, her acting is a not exactly top notch (though she does make a good ship's computer).
- When he was thrown into the past via a time portal thingamabob, his head was left in San Fran for 500 years, thus saving the future yadda yadda yadda.
So having your head stay alive for a long time indicates that you are a robot? Most robots today, if left alone in a cave for 400 years, would probably rust away to nothing.
- Data's emotions chip made for interesting scenes in both the first and second TNG movie.
Again, my point isn't that he's not a good or interesting character, but the whole emotions issue had more to do with the previous success of Spock than because it's believable to assume that AIs will not have emotions.
- I recently saw an episode where Data was lost on a pre-warp planet with some radioactive material, and no memory of who he was. His 'death' in that episode was a lucky event that prevented the prime directive from being violated.
Most computers, if their memory is erased, are incapable of doing anything. How could Data lose his memories but not his programming? It sounds more like conventional amnesia than anything specific to androids.
- Data's head was hooked into the Enterprise once in order to take over as the ship's computer. A glitch ocurred where some of his personality infected the computer, causing replicates to generate cat-food and duplicates of himself on the Holodeck. (Poor Worf...)
Right, because any two computers are compatible, especially a custom designed android and a state of the art military/exploration vessel (and let's not even get started on the old malfunctioning holodeck issue)...
I'll grant you, to an extent, the court case. It still has a lot to do with the bizarreness of his origin, though. Most robots will likely be programmed to enjoy serving humans, and so the issue will not come up. That's one reason I consider the Droids in Star Wars somewhat more believable, there was never any soul searching about what they were, they were just tools. They clearly had some feelings, but they also accepted without question that they were property, and could have their programming altered or erased at their owner's whim.
I've repressed all memory of the 9th movie (Worst Trek Ever, along with 5), so I don't really remember what happened there. Was it just that he was a machine, and they don't like machines? Discrimination is nothing new, they could have just as easily given the people a hatred of Klingons, or whatever. And I didn't even see the 4th movie, so I can't really talk about that.
The point is not that the plot ignored Data being an android. The point is that he is not a realistic depiction of how robots would evolve, or how they would act. It's like those elevators that speak in a "robotic" monotone, because that's how people expect machines to talk. Data behaved how people expect robots to act (no emotions, for example), and had little to do with how they might actually behave.
Yeah, but it's expected that robots are constantly striving to kill their creators (see: Bender, Red Robot, the Terminators, HAL 9000, etc.). A robocide, on the other hand, well that's noteworthy!
Isn't there some bit where he denies being a robot, calling himself an android instead? Anyway, Data being an android was just the excuse to slip a Spock-alike into TNG. Not that I'm complaining, I liked the show, and I liked the character, but Data has no more to do with robotics than I. R2D2 felt more like a tool, was mass produced in the fictional universe (unlike Data, who had a very bizarre origin story, and an "evil twin"), and was generally more believable, I think.
Well, I think the idea is that you look at what a reasonable replacement value would be. The point is that their salaries are NOT at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. For example, when they talk about athletes, they specify over the hill veterans, and the theory is that you could get a rookie with similar abilities for less money (and the rookie's probably going to get better, while the old guy's getting worse). Of course, the article doesn't seem to realize that some of the value of the old guys is in the name. Jerry Rice may not be worth what Oakland is paying him (I don't know, just a hypothetical), but he does get more people to watch their games.
Another example was airline pilots for the majors. Are pilots for JetBlue more likely to crash than pilots for Delta? If not, why do they get paid so much more?
Sounds a bit like Habitat (made by Lucasarts, I think). I never played it, but one of the designers wrote an exceptionally insightful article on what lessons were learned (reprinted in True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, as well as linked off of Slashdot at some point). You are absolutely correct, it is stupid to give you the ability to sell your clothes, even give you an incentive to do so, and then forbid you to do it. Habitat tried to solve the boredom issue by creating interesting areas, as well as having the occasional "event" (such as a treasure hunt, the opening of a new area, whatever). Communities did evolve, and in fact one group actually started an in-game newspaper. IIRC, the game never made it out of the beta stage, so clearly the issue was never totally solved, but it sounded like an interesting experiment in sociology if nothing else.
Ah, here we are, found that link. It's interesting, I promise. Go have a look.
A lot of the things mentioned are still under development. I think it's safe to say that if a company is going to release something before the end of the year, they've started publicizing it by now. Also, as others have mentioned, the Christmas shopping season has begun, so companies have pretty much released all the new products they're planning to release by now (or else the product is delayed, and they're advertising all over the place that it'll be out in the next couple weeks so that people will wait for it). Given that it's a dead tree based magazine, I'm guessing it probably hasn't hit news stands yet, and by the time it does, it'll be close to the end of the year.
There's no penalty for failure! People will exhibit risk-seeking behavior, "investing" in longshots like cold fusion, because the rewards are only given to the very highest earners. Also, there's no political categories, which is no fun. I'll stick with Tradesports.com (I find it highly amusing that for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton was beating out everyone except Dean and Clark, and Clinton's not even running! She's started slipping, I guess people are finally getting the message that she's not changing her mind)
Yeah, this full text search is a huge pain in the ass. There needs to be a way to deactivate it. Searching for common words (like "yoga") now yields tens of thousands of results, most of which have nothing to do with what you're looking for.
Actually, you don't need 50%, you just need to be the single largest shareholder. I don't see anything in the article which says how much the single largest shareholder has, so 10% could very well be enough (usually you need more like 15-20%, but you never know).
Anyway, I doubt it'll stay at 10% for very long. Most likely, the venture capitalists will want to cash out, so they'll sell off more shares in 6 months to a year.
Do you know what a hostile takeover is? It's when one company buys another against the board of director's will. So long as the board owns the company (as is the case for most privately held companies), a hostile takeover is impossible. It is only AFTER a company goes public that hostile takeovers become possible, because the shares are now in the hands of the general public. Microsoft could offer to buy the company from the general public (by offering them a premium above the market price), thereby buying Google against the company's will.
So they actually ARE now taking the risk of a hostile takeover. So long as they were privately held, there was no such risk.
Yes, I was going to post this, but instead, someone should mod this up. The issue isn't that people would think the Simpsons is Fox News. Rather, the worry is that people will think the ticker is an "emergency news broadcast" of some kind, like when they show hurricane warnings on scrolling tickers during other shows.
I'm not sure I would go quite as far as to say the worry is "perfectly justified," but there's at least some validity to the argument. It isn't totally absurd, just a little excessively paranoid.
Education is one of the strongest factors in determining political viewpoints (next to family and wealth) and most journalists hold at least a BA/BS.
Actually, the study I saw showed conservatives more prevalent among the more educated, up until you hit the doctorate level. So HS dropouts are more liberal than HS graduates, who are more liberal than those with undergraduate degrees, who are more more liberal than all graduates except those with doctorates. Then when you look at those with doctorates, there's a sharp reversal. The obvious explanation is that the more educated tend to be more wealthy, and conservatives draw more strongly from the upper classes. Those with doctorates, however, tend to derive their income from the government, though teaching, the court system, or the medical system. So they support larger government.
Anyway, I read that study 2 or 3 years ago, but I have no idea what search terms I would even use to find it on Google. I suppose you didn't post a source either, so I shouldn't feel too bad.
Better at what? Oh, you mean, better at very specific, academic things that interest you?
No, actually I meant that it has a better selection of books, both in narrow diciplines, as well as items of popular interest. Moreover, the catalogue is VASTLY easier to search. Sure, the university library (my university has fewer than 7,000 students, for the record) is focused on certain academic diciplines, but even in areas where it is not focused, it still does a better job. The reason that both exist is simply that public libraries do an inadequate job at just about every task.
Yeah, and don't forget psychological addiction. Alchohol isn't chemically addictive, but there are plenty of alchoholics out there. Anyway, the government doesn't care whether something's bad for you. If it's not one of the priviledged substances (caffine, nicotine, alchohol), then anything mind altering is automatically illegal. No serious studies are even done on the effects.
Our, poor, terribly innefficient government programs are responsible for creating the world's best military.
Given that ALL militaries are, by definition, owned by the government (except I suppose a handful of mercenary outfits, which simply don't have the resources to design their own fighter jets), that's hardly a compelling argument. Indeed, looking at how much is spent on the military, I think the only lesson to learn there is "even if you've got a horribly inefficient process, if you throw hundreds of billions of dollars at a project, things will get done."
I think your library system is the exception. The library at my university is better than the main branch of the public library in San Francisco, where I grew up. Though the university does have a fair amount of money, it seems unlikely that it's outspending a major US city.
Sure, when you've got a situation like the highway system, where it's simply impossible to establish effective competition, then it is the government's responsibility to step in. But look at how many years it takes to do simple things like demolish on-ramps, and it is easy to see that these are not exactly paragons of efficiency.
I'm sorry, but I have NEVER seen a customer support system worse than the DMV. In San Francisco, there is ONE location, it's only open weekdays, during business hours, and you can't do anything substantive over the phone. When was the last time Microsoft made you take a day off work to drive to the city's "Microsoft Support Center" in order to register your product (or whatever). This is far from isolated, I've called government agencies which simply don't pick up their phones, others pack up and go home a good half an hour before the announced cutoff time for calling (so at 4, rather than 4:30). I am young and healthy enough to not have had substantive dealings with health insurance, but there's no way phone companies are even in the same league as the government institutions I've dealt with.
Now, when it comes to electronic voting, I think the issue is that the wrong people are making the purchases. We, the voters, ought to be the consumers. Diebold et al should have to convince you and me that their voting machines are secure, not some chimp in the local elections office.
I agree that the low flow toilets suck, and they clog all the time. I did read an article though, about how apparently toilet manufacturers are looking into electrified flushes, which should solve the problem if they catch on. Also, previously the standardized toilet test involved ping pong balls. Now they've moved to a test that involves sponges with a variable number of nails inside it, which is both more realistic and more difficult to flush. The whole article was pretty funny, but it led me to hope that the current toilet problem will be solved with better technology.
Regarding transcripts, no one actually bothers writing down what people say in speeches. The text of all important speeches are distributed to the press ahead of time. That's why the grammatical errors are corrected, because the printed version never contained any grammatical errors in the first place. The errors were introduced by the speaker.
It's one button. Tablet PCs have the same thing. Joking aside, it's quite useful for killing runaway processes, often faster than the corresponding ps aux, kill -HUP (and if that doesn't work, kill -9) combo under linux.
Could appointing a Reoublican harm the MPAA's relationship with the Democratic party? Given that most of California's legislators are Dems, that would be a big deal. Feinstein and Boxer, the two Senators, have been firmly in the motion picture industry's pocket as long as I can remember. At the moment, partisanship aside, NO party has been standing up to the MP/RIAA. I don't care which party it is, but I would really like to see some division between the parties on this issue.
On the other hand, I suppose the MPAA wouldn't do this if they thought there was any chance that it would make waves with their Democrat allies.
1) Too heavy. A tablet needs to be light enough to hold comfortably with one hand. You need to write with the other one.
I know slashdotters are out of shape, but most tablets weigh less than 4 lbs. If you can't hold 4 lbs in one hand, resting on your forearm like a clipboard, you've got more problems than what kind of computer to buy.
2) Too expensive. Even the tablets with keyboards (yes, some of them have keyboards) are much more expensive than a comparable laptop.
This is probably the most important point. No doubt prices would come down with economies of scale, but due to the fact that tablets are very small and light relative to full sized laptops, they will always be a little more expensive. If the tablet offers you no advantages, you shouldn't buy it.
3) Short battery life. See point 1, above.
I get 3.5 hours under heavy use. I have difficulty imagining any situation other than air travel where I would go for longer than that without access to a power outlet. So far, I've never run out of power. I'd LOVE if it were longer, so I didn't even have to think about it, and if that's something you need, Electrovaya makes an 8 hour model (with a Crusoe processor), but for me, it just wasn't necessary.
4) Fragility. You're carrying around a color LCD plus digitizer (i.e., $$$). You're writing on it. It's collecting dust and dirt. Pity about that scratch, crack, ding...
I can't speak for all models, but my Motion tablet came with a cover. With the cover attached, it's more sturdy than my old Dell laptop was. Indeed, given that the first things to break on my laptop were mouse buttons and the hinge to open and close it, I suspect my tablet will be considerably sturdier (no damage so far, after 3 months). Yes, you should wipe it off with the cleaning cloth to get rid of dust, but that hardly seems like a serious complaint.
5) False mimicry. The parallax between screen pixels and moving pen point makes it really, really clear that you're not using a pen on paper.
It works for me. On the other hand, I only a pen and paper very rarely (it's actually amazing how much my cursive has improved through 2 months of note taking with the tablet rather than a laptop. My writing used to look like a 4th grader's, now it looks fairly respectable). I guess that's more of a personal taste, and a good reason to go to a retail outlet like CompUSA, Franklin Covey, or Gateway to try one out before buying.
Hey, if jotting down a phone number on your hand works for you, great. For myself, I wash my hand occasionally, and I know enough people that I'll run out of space. The Tablet PC is easier to write on than a PDA, and less likely to misread what you wrote (you can use handwriting recognition, or just leave it as a handwritten note, and then have the computer convert your handwriting to text when you get back to the office). On the other hand, it's bigger, and has a shorter battery life (I get about 3.5 hours, and it's about as big as a legal pad inside one of those leather folders). With standby mode, both are instant-on. So, I'm not sure that the advantages over a PDA are too compelling, but neither are there serious drawbacks.
On the other hand, I LOVE it as a way to take notes for class. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but the beta for One Note has been excellent. Creating a new page for each day's lecture is convenient, separating graphs and charts from ordinary text is useful, and of course the ability to quickly insert space in the middle of a page is great. Moreover, it has an integrated recording feature, so I can review lectures later on my mp3 player while I run. It looks like I'm going to have to pay through the nose to get the full version, although its not in at the bookstore yet, so I don't know what the student discount will be.
Moreover, the tablet is also quite useful for those of us with artistic inclinations, giving a portable Wacom tablet that doesn't need to be plugged into another computer.
No, the tablet form factor is not good for data entry. Although, it is easy enough to buy a docking station if you do want it to double as a work station. For myself, I have a desktop already, so all I need my portable to do is take notes and organize contacts & schedules.
But that is not how it was in Florida. Yes, if you take all the difficult features of all the stupid punch card systems and put them all together to make the ultimate in stupid voting systems, it would be difficult to use. But if you just look at the Florida system, it looked pretty simple, until the vote was close enough that people started actually paying attention to how the ballots were counted, and realized it was being done in a totally arbitrary fashion.
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I suppose the better alternative is to avoid long trips where possible, but sometimes it's unavoidable, or sometimes the benefits outweigh the negatives. So I agree that one should not use TV as a babysitter at home, but on trips longer than a couple hours, I see no problem.
Also, another reason Spock was promoted to second in command is that the producers didn't feel that the fact that Gene was having an affair with Majel Barret was enough of a reason to give her a leading role. Let's face it, her acting is a not exactly top notch (though she does make a good ship's computer).
- When he was thrown into the past via a time portal thingamabob, his head was left in San Fran for 500 years, thus saving the future yadda yadda yadda.
So having your head stay alive for a long time indicates that you are a robot? Most robots today, if left alone in a cave for 400 years, would probably rust away to nothing.
- Data's emotions chip made for interesting scenes in both the first and second TNG movie.
Again, my point isn't that he's not a good or interesting character, but the whole emotions issue had more to do with the previous success of Spock than because it's believable to assume that AIs will not have emotions.
- I recently saw an episode where Data was lost on a pre-warp planet with some radioactive material, and no memory of who he was. His 'death' in that episode was a lucky event that prevented the prime directive from being violated.
Most computers, if their memory is erased, are incapable of doing anything. How could Data lose his memories but not his programming? It sounds more like conventional amnesia than anything specific to androids.
- Data's head was hooked into the Enterprise once in order to take over as the ship's computer. A glitch ocurred where some of his personality infected the computer, causing replicates to generate cat-food and duplicates of himself on the Holodeck. (Poor Worf...)
Right, because any two computers are compatible, especially a custom designed android and a state of the art military/exploration vessel (and let's not even get started on the old malfunctioning holodeck issue)...
I'll grant you, to an extent, the court case. It still has a lot to do with the bizarreness of his origin, though. Most robots will likely be programmed to enjoy serving humans, and so the issue will not come up. That's one reason I consider the Droids in Star Wars somewhat more believable, there was never any soul searching about what they were, they were just tools. They clearly had some feelings, but they also accepted without question that they were property, and could have their programming altered or erased at their owner's whim.
I've repressed all memory of the 9th movie (Worst Trek Ever, along with 5), so I don't really remember what happened there. Was it just that he was a machine, and they don't like machines? Discrimination is nothing new, they could have just as easily given the people a hatred of Klingons, or whatever. And I didn't even see the 4th movie, so I can't really talk about that.
The point is not that the plot ignored Data being an android. The point is that he is not a realistic depiction of how robots would evolve, or how they would act. It's like those elevators that speak in a "robotic" monotone, because that's how people expect machines to talk. Data behaved how people expect robots to act (no emotions, for example), and had little to do with how they might actually behave.
Yeah, but it's expected that robots are constantly striving to kill their creators (see: Bender, Red Robot, the Terminators, HAL 9000, etc.). A robocide, on the other hand, well that's noteworthy!
Isn't there some bit where he denies being a robot, calling himself an android instead? Anyway, Data being an android was just the excuse to slip a Spock-alike into TNG. Not that I'm complaining, I liked the show, and I liked the character, but Data has no more to do with robotics than I. R2D2 felt more like a tool, was mass produced in the fictional universe (unlike Data, who had a very bizarre origin story, and an "evil twin"), and was generally more believable, I think.
Another example was airline pilots for the majors. Are pilots for JetBlue more likely to crash than pilots for Delta? If not, why do they get paid so much more?
Ah, here we are, found that link. It's interesting, I promise. Go have a look.
A lot of the things mentioned are still under development. I think it's safe to say that if a company is going to release something before the end of the year, they've started publicizing it by now. Also, as others have mentioned, the Christmas shopping season has begun, so companies have pretty much released all the new products they're planning to release by now (or else the product is delayed, and they're advertising all over the place that it'll be out in the next couple weeks so that people will wait for it). Given that it's a dead tree based magazine, I'm guessing it probably hasn't hit news stands yet, and by the time it does, it'll be close to the end of the year.
There's no penalty for failure! People will exhibit risk-seeking behavior, "investing" in longshots like cold fusion, because the rewards are only given to the very highest earners. Also, there's no political categories, which is no fun. I'll stick with Tradesports.com (I find it highly amusing that for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton was beating out everyone except Dean and Clark, and Clinton's not even running! She's started slipping, I guess people are finally getting the message that she's not changing her mind)
Yeah, this full text search is a huge pain in the ass. There needs to be a way to deactivate it. Searching for common words (like "yoga") now yields tens of thousands of results, most of which have nothing to do with what you're looking for.
Anyway, I doubt it'll stay at 10% for very long. Most likely, the venture capitalists will want to cash out, so they'll sell off more shares in 6 months to a year.
So they actually ARE now taking the risk of a hostile takeover. So long as they were privately held, there was no such risk.
I'm not sure I would go quite as far as to say the worry is "perfectly justified," but there's at least some validity to the argument. It isn't totally absurd, just a little excessively paranoid.
Actually, the study I saw showed conservatives more prevalent among the more educated, up until you hit the doctorate level. So HS dropouts are more liberal than HS graduates, who are more liberal than those with undergraduate degrees, who are more more liberal than all graduates except those with doctorates. Then when you look at those with doctorates, there's a sharp reversal. The obvious explanation is that the more educated tend to be more wealthy, and conservatives draw more strongly from the upper classes. Those with doctorates, however, tend to derive their income from the government, though teaching, the court system, or the medical system. So they support larger government.
Anyway, I read that study 2 or 3 years ago, but I have no idea what search terms I would even use to find it on Google. I suppose you didn't post a source either, so I shouldn't feel too bad.
No, actually I meant that it has a better selection of books, both in narrow diciplines, as well as items of popular interest. Moreover, the catalogue is VASTLY easier to search. Sure, the university library (my university has fewer than 7,000 students, for the record) is focused on certain academic diciplines, but even in areas where it is not focused, it still does a better job. The reason that both exist is simply that public libraries do an inadequate job at just about every task.
Yeah, and don't forget psychological addiction. Alchohol isn't chemically addictive, but there are plenty of alchoholics out there. Anyway, the government doesn't care whether something's bad for you. If it's not one of the priviledged substances (caffine, nicotine, alchohol), then anything mind altering is automatically illegal. No serious studies are even done on the effects.
Given that ALL militaries are, by definition, owned by the government (except I suppose a handful of mercenary outfits, which simply don't have the resources to design their own fighter jets), that's hardly a compelling argument. Indeed, looking at how much is spent on the military, I think the only lesson to learn there is "even if you've got a horribly inefficient process, if you throw hundreds of billions of dollars at a project, things will get done."
I think your library system is the exception. The library at my university is better than the main branch of the public library in San Francisco, where I grew up. Though the university does have a fair amount of money, it seems unlikely that it's outspending a major US city.
Sure, when you've got a situation like the highway system, where it's simply impossible to establish effective competition, then it is the government's responsibility to step in. But look at how many years it takes to do simple things like demolish on-ramps, and it is easy to see that these are not exactly paragons of efficiency.
I'm sorry, but I have NEVER seen a customer support system worse than the DMV. In San Francisco, there is ONE location, it's only open weekdays, during business hours, and you can't do anything substantive over the phone. When was the last time Microsoft made you take a day off work to drive to the city's "Microsoft Support Center" in order to register your product (or whatever). This is far from isolated, I've called government agencies which simply don't pick up their phones, others pack up and go home a good half an hour before the announced cutoff time for calling (so at 4, rather than 4:30). I am young and healthy enough to not have had substantive dealings with health insurance, but there's no way phone companies are even in the same league as the government institutions I've dealt with.
Now, when it comes to electronic voting, I think the issue is that the wrong people are making the purchases. We, the voters, ought to be the consumers. Diebold et al should have to convince you and me that their voting machines are secure, not some chimp in the local elections office.
I agree that the low flow toilets suck, and they clog all the time. I did read an article though, about how apparently toilet manufacturers are looking into electrified flushes, which should solve the problem if they catch on. Also, previously the standardized toilet test involved ping pong balls. Now they've moved to a test that involves sponges with a variable number of nails inside it, which is both more realistic and more difficult to flush. The whole article was pretty funny, but it led me to hope that the current toilet problem will be solved with better technology.
OTOH, how much passive cooling do you think you're going to get in, say, the Iraqi deserts?
Regarding transcripts, no one actually bothers writing down what people say in speeches. The text of all important speeches are distributed to the press ahead of time. That's why the grammatical errors are corrected, because the printed version never contained any grammatical errors in the first place. The errors were introduced by the speaker.
It's one button. Tablet PCs have the same thing. Joking aside, it's quite useful for killing runaway processes, often faster than the corresponding ps aux, kill -HUP (and if that doesn't work, kill -9) combo under linux.
On the other hand, I suppose the MPAA wouldn't do this if they thought there was any chance that it would make waves with their Democrat allies.
I know slashdotters are out of shape, but most tablets weigh less than 4 lbs. If you can't hold 4 lbs in one hand, resting on your forearm like a clipboard, you've got more problems than what kind of computer to buy.
2) Too expensive. Even the tablets with keyboards (yes, some of them have keyboards) are much more expensive than a comparable laptop.
This is probably the most important point. No doubt prices would come down with economies of scale, but due to the fact that tablets are very small and light relative to full sized laptops, they will always be a little more expensive. If the tablet offers you no advantages, you shouldn't buy it.
3) Short battery life. See point 1, above.
I get 3.5 hours under heavy use. I have difficulty imagining any situation other than air travel where I would go for longer than that without access to a power outlet. So far, I've never run out of power. I'd LOVE if it were longer, so I didn't even have to think about it, and if that's something you need, Electrovaya makes an 8 hour model (with a Crusoe processor), but for me, it just wasn't necessary.
4) Fragility. You're carrying around a color LCD plus digitizer (i.e., $$$). You're writing on it. It's collecting dust and dirt. Pity about that scratch, crack, ding ...
I can't speak for all models, but my Motion tablet came with a cover. With the cover attached, it's more sturdy than my old Dell laptop was. Indeed, given that the first things to break on my laptop were mouse buttons and the hinge to open and close it, I suspect my tablet will be considerably sturdier (no damage so far, after 3 months). Yes, you should wipe it off with the cleaning cloth to get rid of dust, but that hardly seems like a serious complaint.
5) False mimicry. The parallax between screen pixels and moving pen point makes it really, really clear that you're not using a pen on paper.
It works for me. On the other hand, I only a pen and paper very rarely (it's actually amazing how much my cursive has improved through 2 months of note taking with the tablet rather than a laptop. My writing used to look like a 4th grader's, now it looks fairly respectable). I guess that's more of a personal taste, and a good reason to go to a retail outlet like CompUSA, Franklin Covey, or Gateway to try one out before buying.
On the other hand, I LOVE it as a way to take notes for class. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but the beta for One Note has been excellent. Creating a new page for each day's lecture is convenient, separating graphs and charts from ordinary text is useful, and of course the ability to quickly insert space in the middle of a page is great. Moreover, it has an integrated recording feature, so I can review lectures later on my mp3 player while I run. It looks like I'm going to have to pay through the nose to get the full version, although its not in at the bookstore yet, so I don't know what the student discount will be.
Moreover, the tablet is also quite useful for those of us with artistic inclinations, giving a portable Wacom tablet that doesn't need to be plugged into another computer.
No, the tablet form factor is not good for data entry. Although, it is easy enough to buy a docking station if you do want it to double as a work station. For myself, I have a desktop already, so all I need my portable to do is take notes and organize contacts & schedules.
But that is not how it was in Florida. Yes, if you take all the difficult features of all the stupid punch card systems and put them all together to make the ultimate in stupid voting systems, it would be difficult to use. But if you just look at the Florida system, it looked pretty simple, until the vote was close enough that people started actually paying attention to how the ballots were counted, and realized it was being done in a totally arbitrary fashion.