the "how important plate tectonics may be to life"
To complicate matters (and yes, I read Ward & Brownlee's book when it came out too. It was an interesting read, but not 100% convincing. But then I am a geologist, not an OOL researcher.), when life started around 3800 million years ago (possibly as early as 4300 million years ago) the tectonic regime was decidedly different to today. This was probably driven by the higher heat flow of the early Earth, as there were more radioactive materials around then.
Modern plate tectonics seems to have started around 2500 million years ago. In the Archean, the tectonic style seemed to have much smaller microplates with narrower oceans and narrower subduction belts.
The headline (strapline? whatever) picture in TFA is a radar-derived depiction of one of the larger mountains on Venus. I forget the name, unfortunately. (Wikipedia and my memory tells me that it's Maxwell Montes, which is 11km above the average level of the surface, making Venus somewhat more irregular than the Earth, but not hugely more irregular.)
To segregate low-density material to the surface you need to have mass movement. Without external stirring, then you'll need to have internal stirring, which seems to be achieved with convection as a result of self-heating by radioactive decay in the mantle. The resulting movement results in the accumulation of low-density material at the surface and high density material at the core-mantle boundary.
The amount of water injected into the mantle by subduction is sufficient to have a major effect on the mantle's stiffness. Without that water, plate tectonics is likely to stop considerably sooner than otherwise as the Earth cools.
at the expense^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H profit of his students who are preparing for their AP exams.
It's to the profit of the students : this is a valuable lesson. DO NOT stand up for your (or even worse, other people's) rights ; DO NOT oppose The Management.
The students should be paying extra tuition fees (cash only) to the Administrators who came up with this stunt.
There is not a probability that this event will happen selected by random chance. It's essentially certainty that this event will happen.
In the same way, a Boltzmann Brain is also nearly a statistical certainty. OK - their probability is only like 10^-100 per year, but since the future has an essentially unlimited number of years, then the average lifeform in the universe is a Boltzmann Brain.
If you agree that one event in 200 years of observations gives us an estimated probability of 0.5% events per year, then yes, it is true that in a period of some thousands of years such an event becomes essentially a certainty. But the probability remains at 0.5% per year.
Yes, that is assuming that Carrington events are independent of each other. Which is an hypothesis that we have NO evidence against. It would not be surprising if it turned out that Carrington Events are more common at Solar Maximum (for example), but with a sample of ONE event, we don't know how they're distributed w.r.t. the solar cycle.
What we do know is that in approximately 15 solar cycles, we've seen approximately one Carrington event. So that's an average of about 0.067 Carrington events per solar cycle. Same rate, different scale.
Since when do Saturn Vs have sufficient fuel to fire for a year straight?
Since when did anyone (other than you) suggest using Saturn Vs for a job like this?
For a long term job like this, you'd be looking at an ion drive powered by a solar panel array, which is strong enough to counteract the gravitational attraction of the tractor-ship to the asteroid. Produce a few kilogrammes of thrust for the several years necessary ; re-supply with Xenon (probably) with an automated ship as necessary. Redundant ion drives (3 or 5, or more) arranged so that the exhaust doesn't impinge on the asteroid surface.
Seriously, the designs for doing this have been discussed on here (and in more serious fora) multiple times in the last decade. Have you missed all of them?
Using current traditional soil methods, one acre of fodder grass will require 100,000 gallons of water. Most of this water is lost via transpiration of the plant and evaporation from the soil. I can build you a 1/8 acre building, load it up with recirculating vertical-stacked NFT channels, and you could produce that same acre of grass using 1,000 gallons of water.
That would be say 10,000lbs, 4.5 tons of grass. Not a great yield for an acre, but not a disastrously bad one either.
So the 1000 gallons of water cycles through the hydroponic system around 100 times as it is gradually absorbed by the plants. Each time it is picked up by the plants and transpired (moving nutrients around in the plant in the process), it then gets re-captured from the atmosphere, re-condensed and pumped back into the hydroponics system.
We bought a lemon tree, then we were told we had to destroy it because it wasn't licensed.
This implies that you brought a ready-grown tree. Maybe only a few kilos, but that still takes a year or so to achieve, so they're relatively expensive. (This reminds me to water the 2m tall lemon tree sitting in the living room window, which we started from a seed in 2006. With pot and soil, it's over 30kilos.)
It just wanted to self-replicate and make us free food.
This, on the other hand, implies that you grew the tree from seed, or from a cutting of an original tree. The seed is one case, and is one of the reasons that plant breeders try to develop seedless versions of fruit, or ones with a very low germination rate. The propagation from cuttings though is much easier to contain, because you need access to the tree, not the fruit.
I was at the garden centre with the wife this afternoon. Many of the plant cultivars which the wife wanted to buy carried notices barring the buyer from propagating them without getting the prior written permission of the rights holding company. Buying those would have constituted accepting the terms of the contract, so I steered the wife to other cultivars from other suppliers which didn't carry such warnings.
I suspect that you brought a lemon tree from somewhere, and in the process agreed to a similar "no propagation" contract (did you actually read the terms of the contract that you entered into?) ; then you propagated the lemon tree to produce a clone (yes, a "clone", in the sense of "clone"). In doing so, you violated the terms of the contract you'd entered into with the selling company. And they complained to appropriate authorities,who forced you to comply with the terms of the contract into which you'd entered.
(Your local laws and contract law may differ. But I suspect there's something along those lines happening. It's possible you did it from a seed, and the laws you have are even more restrictive than we have to deal with here. If your contract law allows you to be held to the terms of a contract that you're not shown... it'll be almost like software sales.)
Nope, just an exciting 1980s proposal for one way in which significant parts of life's metabolism could plausibly have developed from an inorganic system into an organic one. There's nothing new about this article - OOL people have been discussing this since the detection of sub-surface water on Europa, and the basic research (Mike Russell's) was done in the 1980s based on theoretical work in the 1970s by Gunter Wachtershauser. None of which violates Maxwell's laws of thermodynamics, because they don't take place in closed systems.
Dr. Nick Lane has a more extended discussion on the possibility of life originating due to naturally-occurring proton imbalances in his book "Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life".
... which was published a number of years ago. My copy has been on my bookshelf for at least 3 years, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't news when it came out.
The basic ideas that are presented here are not new (this isn't to diss Nick Lane - he's done some very interesting work, and written some good popular science books and articles). As the actual article (but not TFS) says, the basic idea of life developing from flow of alkaline hydrothermal fluids through pyrite deposits comes from Mike Russell in the early 1980s (and that develops work from Gunter Wachtershauser in the 1970s).
One of the more attractive features of this theory is that it allows incremental conversion of an inorganic chemical system into an organic one which fixes carbon dioxide into organic molecules. It would also explain the presence of iron-sulphur molecular groups in the cores of many important enzymes. It is one of the lead contenders in OOL discussions. But it's probably not the final answer.
Using the back of a different envelope, let's hypothesise some mutation to ebola that gives it a 70% mortality rate (the mean of the mortality rates you cite), and a flu-like transmission profile. Then in around 5 years of cycling through the population, we'll be down to about 2.1 billion people left on the planet. That's around the population in the late 1920s to late 1930s.
Add on your 69 years for 3 generations and we'll be back to a population situation of 1933 + 69 = 2002. In short, we'd be back to the approximate population position of today.
I see that you cite American flu rates, suggesting that you may be American. Given that, likely you live there and rarely leave (average American)? Of the last 3 years I've spent about 8-9 months (I'd have to check my pay slips) living in various countries of Africa and on my last rotation out of there an aircraft fault put us down into Abidjan airport, which borders the most recent ebola outbreak. My next rotation into Africa will see me in Gabon, in the thick of the "ebola belt". Ebola isn't a theoretical issue for me, and I'm paying close attention to the vaccine work, and would consider participating in clinical trials of one.
Yes, I remember the Psion Organiser. I never had one myself, but a guy at work dropped his into one of the chemical storage pits (filled with an oil/ water/ salt mix), and since we were 2 weeks from getting back to shore, he asked me if I could try and bring it back to life. All I did was clean it - very carefully, inside and out, water, alcohol, water, alcohol - and then dry it very, very carefully. But it worked when I put it back together, which allowed him to back it up. And it carried on working until the next hitch on the vessel, which astonished everyone.
That stuck in my memory for 8 years later when I was looking for something better then a Nokia Communicator, and which I'd be able to take to work. I wasn't disappointed by the hardware Psion were selling then.
Sure, it was running a great OS for the time but that OS did not have the kind of app ecosystem that the iPad does.
And it didn't need it.
Writing documents - covered on the stock ROM (and you could get converters to go to Word and or Write formats too).
Spreadsheets - I could make the stock ROM's spreadsheet do the calculations for steering oil wells. Other people I knew ran their stock portfolios on their Psions. Converters available.
Drawing... well, you could do it. The 4-shade grey screen was a limit there, but it was good enough for my purposes. Converters available.
Database - again, good enough for my purposes. I knew a mud man who did his stock control on one, so I guess that was good enough for him.
Presentations... I think they didn't see making presentations as being a use case.
There were a LOT of other apps out there - I remember buying several, such as astronomical tools - but you could take the machine out of it's box on Xmas day and be up and running for any regular office tasks.
I used a Compaq desktop system which included a touch screen in 1989. It worked - and since I was new to computers then (I didn't actually have one at home at the time, and at work we used industrial rackmounts with teleprinter terminals and HP 9800 series systems for report writing.) The technology for touchscreens is decades old. IIRC those touch screens added about $1500 to the cost of the system, which wasn't a particular problem. If MS had agreed to include the drivers for them in Windows 3.0, then we'd probably have had the touchscreen revolution in 1991.
We hooked those systems up to the old Motorola analogue mobile phones - we could get 2400 BPS data links from 70 miles offshore. Since the antennae for a formal radio system would have cost 10s of thousands of dollars for installation, and be repeated each time we needed to hire a vessel, then the price of the touchscreen didn't seem too unreasonable. We saved hundreds of thousands over the years that system was working!
Ahhh, memories. Xenix! X! Multiple overlapping windows! All so new then.
And with an $800 BoM, you'd have been up against a £400 Psion 5 (retail cost), which included all applications necessary (was a web browser considered necessary at the time? I honestly can't remember. I know I did do some web browsing on it, because it would connect well to my Sony mobile or Nokia Communicator ; but I honestly can't remember if the web browser was built in or one I chose)., a large installed base of users with their own applications from the 3- and 5- series and an established dealer network.
Oh, hang on - you priced things in dollars. American? Then no Psion dealer network. Maybe you'd have survived.
Technologies that had to mature before the tablet computers became practical:
Wifi networking.
Useful, I'll agree. Not "necessary". I ran cables throughout the old house in the mid-1990s, and was getting a stable 100MBPS connection from any computer from about 1996 until we left in 2012. If I had a guest and I wanted to provide them with WiFi, I'd turn on the laptops WiFi card and the last time I did it, they could get half the connection speed that I had through the cable. I was considering running 1000-base, but would probably have left it until the previous cable was 20 years old before replacing it.
Capacitive Touchscreens -- Most early designs used a stylus, which sucks, and had poor resolution to boot
I used a touch screen with a stylus. You might think that they suck, but I'm perfectly happy with them. My Psion used one (and I never lost one!) and my last - or last-but-one - phone also had a stylus (which I also didn't lose, until I lost the phone itself). You might think that they suck, but that's a subjective opinion, not an objective fact.
Low power but still acceptably fast processors -- A huge sticking point, lots of early tablets had extremely poor battery life on top of being slow
Yeah... in 2000 I objected so badly to replacing the AA cells (rechargeable or primary) EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It was such a pain in the arse having to go to any shop in the world and buy two batteries EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It's so much better having to carry a charger (and the panoply of adaptors for the 5 different sockets that I meet most months) with me and having to recharge the device several times a day.
A touch enabled OS -- WinCE is terrible to use with a finger, and really pretty bad with a stylus. Symbian was never great. PalmOS was too narrowly focused on Palm pilots
When I discovered Symbian, I never felt the need to try a WinCE machine or a Palm machine. I just got on with using the applications and barely noticed the OS. Which is how it should be.
Battery capacity -- Battery technology has come a long way inetwork speed n the past 15 years. Early attempts would use NiCad batteries, which just aren't good enough, especially with the relatively high energy consumption figures from the old chips
See above comments about the horrors of a monthly battery change (Either NiCads, NiMHs or primaries).
The technology to make effective "tablet" devices was available in the late 1990s - Psion did it. To this day, it's a mystery to the community of "Psioneers" why they stopped manufacturing them, or why they didn't sell the hardware division as a going concern when they restructured to become a software-only company. If they'd continued... well, the world is full of "if onlys".
Because it, well, works. The older tech worked poorly when it worked at all and suffered a much higher rate of failure.
Crap resistive touchscreens were crap because they were crap. Good resistive touchscreens were good because they were good, not crap.
See up-thread for comments about the Psion 5 family. I forget who made the touchscreen - I know that the display was a Hitachi part, but I can't remember if you could get the touchscreen separately. That was a good part - and probably one of the highest cost items on the BoM to build the device. But it was also one of the major features of the device, and essential to it's success.
Capacitive touchscreens are more accurate to use with a bare finger than resistive ones, which call for a stylus
[SHRUG]
When you want accuracy from fingertips, you use an implement. Be that a dissecting needle and forceps (I spend several hours each working day at the microscope - it shows), or a stylus, or a keyboard. Fingertips weren't designed for precision work. They evolved to their current form while we were still making tools by banging rocks together. By the time we started to make needles and fabrics, our ancestors were already "anatomically modern humans".
I used Psion 5s and 5mxs for about 10 years until supplies dried up - during the period that this device was designed. Applications and an excellent (for a pocket device) keyboard made the Psion ; the stylus wasn't a problem.
13 years ago I was using a Psion 5 pocket computer (running EPOC, later renamed Symbian). Terrible feature set - you could drop in as large a CF card as you could afford. Connectivity was by serial cable (I moved data on and off via the CF card, so didn't bother much with the cable, and often forgot to pack it.) A half-VGA 4-grey screen (internally EPOC could handle 16 colours, but the colour screens destroyed the battery life and wrecked the price point). A keyboard with good responsiveness and which you could type on for hours (I did all the time). A touch screen that worked. A suite of office applications which met my needs. And most important of all - it would run for a month on a pair of AA cells.
13 years later, the tablet market is bringing out some devices that are comparable with the Psion 5, but are all severely crippled by being hooked to an app purchase "store", instead of providing adequate functionality out of the box. I spent about 5 years after Psion stopped producing the 5s using ebaY to get spares to repair mine (the screens were not robust!) before reluctantly giving up on them. But that month of battery life... irreplaceable.
Slashdot Mirror
Because we allowed their parents to breed.
You typed this on a computer that you personally carved from a lump of tree. Oh, but you did the carving with a flint knife.
Sorry, but you've just done the geology department's self-justification task for them. You've left them with nothing to do!
To complicate matters (and yes, I read Ward & Brownlee's book when it came out too. It was an interesting read, but not 100% convincing. But then I am a geologist, not an OOL researcher.), when life started around 3800 million years ago (possibly as early as 4300 million years ago) the tectonic regime was decidedly different to today. This was probably driven by the higher heat flow of the early Earth, as there were more radioactive materials around then.
Modern plate tectonics seems to have started around 2500 million years ago. In the Archean, the tectonic style seemed to have much smaller microplates with narrower oceans and narrower subduction belts.
The headline (strapline? whatever) picture in TFA is a radar-derived depiction of one of the larger mountains on Venus. I forget the name, unfortunately. (Wikipedia and my memory tells me that it's Maxwell Montes, which is 11km above the average level of the surface, making Venus somewhat more irregular than the Earth, but not hugely more irregular.)
As Paracelsus pointed out in the 16th (15th?) century, it's the dose that makes the poison.
To segregate low-density material to the surface you need to have mass movement. Without external stirring, then you'll need to have internal stirring, which seems to be achieved with convection as a result of self-heating by radioactive decay in the mantle. The resulting movement results in the accumulation of low-density material at the surface and high density material at the core-mantle boundary.
The amount of water injected into the mantle by subduction is sufficient to have a major effect on the mantle's stiffness. Without that water, plate tectonics is likely to stop considerably sooner than otherwise as the Earth cools.
It's to the profit of the students : this is a valuable lesson. DO NOT stand up for your (or even worse, other people's) rights ; DO NOT oppose The Management.
The students should be paying extra tuition fees (cash only) to the Administrators who came up with this stunt.
In the same way, a Boltzmann Brain is also nearly a statistical certainty. OK - their probability is only like 10^-100 per year, but since the future has an essentially unlimited number of years, then the average lifeform in the universe is a Boltzmann Brain.
If you agree that one event in 200 years of observations gives us an estimated probability of 0.5% events per year, then yes, it is true that in a period of some thousands of years such an event becomes essentially a certainty. But the probability remains at 0.5% per year.
Yes, that is assuming that Carrington events are independent of each other. Which is an hypothesis that we have NO evidence against. It would not be surprising if it turned out that Carrington Events are more common at Solar Maximum (for example), but with a sample of ONE event, we don't know how they're distributed w.r.t. the solar cycle.
What we do know is that in approximately 15 solar cycles, we've seen approximately one Carrington event. So that's an average of about 0.067 Carrington events per solar cycle. Same rate, different scale.
Since when did anyone (other than you) suggest using Saturn Vs for a job like this?
For a long term job like this, you'd be looking at an ion drive powered by a solar panel array, which is strong enough to counteract the gravitational attraction of the tractor-ship to the asteroid. Produce a few kilogrammes of thrust for the several years necessary ; re-supply with Xenon (probably) with an automated ship as necessary. Redundant ion drives (3 or 5, or more) arranged so that the exhaust doesn't impinge on the asteroid surface.
Seriously, the designs for doing this have been discussed on here (and in more serious fora) multiple times in the last decade. Have you missed all of them?
They get a beak job.
That would be say 10,000lbs, 4.5 tons of grass. Not a great yield for an acre, but not a disastrously bad one either.
So the 1000 gallons of water cycles through the hydroponic system around 100 times as it is gradually absorbed by the plants. Each time it is picked up by the plants and transpired (moving nutrients around in the plant in the process), it then gets re-captured from the atmosphere, re-condensed and pumped back into the hydroponics system.
This implies that you brought a ready-grown tree. Maybe only a few kilos, but that still takes a year or so to achieve, so they're relatively expensive. (This reminds me to water the 2m tall lemon tree sitting in the living room window, which we started from a seed in 2006. With pot and soil, it's over 30kilos.)
This, on the other hand, implies that you grew the tree from seed, or from a cutting of an original tree. The seed is one case, and is one of the reasons that plant breeders try to develop seedless versions of fruit, or ones with a very low germination rate. The propagation from cuttings though is much easier to contain, because you need access to the tree, not the fruit.
I was at the garden centre with the wife this afternoon. Many of the plant cultivars which the wife wanted to buy carried notices barring the buyer from propagating them without getting the prior written permission of the rights holding company. Buying those would have constituted accepting the terms of the contract, so I steered the wife to other cultivars from other suppliers which didn't carry such warnings.
I suspect that you brought a lemon tree from somewhere, and in the process agreed to a similar "no propagation" contract (did you actually read the terms of the contract that you entered into?) ; then you propagated the lemon tree to produce a clone (yes, a "clone", in the sense of "clone"). In doing so, you violated the terms of the contract you'd entered into with the selling company. And they complained to appropriate authorities ,who forced you to comply with the terms of the contract into which you'd entered.
(Your local laws and contract law may differ. But I suspect there's something along those lines happening. It's possible you did it from a seed, and the laws you have are even more restrictive than we have to deal with here. If your contract law allows you to be held to the terms of a contract that you're not shown ... it'll be almost like software sales.)
It is one of several theories of abiogenesis, which are all under consideration by researchers.
Nope, just an exciting 1980s proposal for one way in which significant parts of life's metabolism could plausibly have developed from an inorganic system into an organic one. There's nothing new about this article - OOL people have been discussing this since the detection of sub-surface water on Europa, and the basic research (Mike Russell's) was done in the 1980s based on theoretical work in the 1970s by Gunter Wachtershauser. None of which violates Maxwell's laws of thermodynamics, because they don't take place in closed systems.
... which was published a number of years ago. My copy has been on my bookshelf for at least 3 years, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't news when it came out.
The basic ideas that are presented here are not new (this isn't to diss Nick Lane - he's done some very interesting work, and written some good popular science books and articles). As the actual article (but not TFS) says, the basic idea of life developing from flow of alkaline hydrothermal fluids through pyrite deposits comes from Mike Russell in the early 1980s (and that develops work from Gunter Wachtershauser in the 1970s).
One of the more attractive features of this theory is that it allows incremental conversion of an inorganic chemical system into an organic one which fixes carbon dioxide into organic molecules. It would also explain the presence of iron-sulphur molecular groups in the cores of many important enzymes. It is one of the lead contenders in OOL discussions. But it's probably not the final answer.
Add on your 69 years for 3 generations and we'll be back to a population situation of 1933 + 69 = 2002. In short, we'd be back to the approximate population position of today.
I see that you cite American flu rates, suggesting that you may be American. Given that, likely you live there and rarely leave (average American)? Of the last 3 years I've spent about 8-9 months (I'd have to check my pay slips) living in various countries of Africa and on my last rotation out of there an aircraft fault put us down into Abidjan airport, which borders the most recent ebola outbreak. My next rotation into Africa will see me in Gabon, in the thick of the "ebola belt". Ebola isn't a theoretical issue for me, and I'm paying close attention to the vaccine work, and would consider participating in clinical trials of one.
That stuck in my memory for 8 years later when I was looking for something better then a Nokia Communicator, and which I'd be able to take to work. I wasn't disappointed by the hardware Psion were selling then.
And it didn't need it.
Writing documents - covered on the stock ROM (and you could get converters to go to Word and or Write formats too).
Spreadsheets - I could make the stock ROM's spreadsheet do the calculations for steering oil wells. Other people I knew ran their stock portfolios on their Psions. Converters available.
Drawing ... well, you could do it. The 4-shade grey screen was a limit there, but it was good enough for my purposes. Converters available.
Database - again, good enough for my purposes. I knew a mud man who did his stock control on one, so I guess that was good enough for him.
Presentations ... I think they didn't see making presentations as being a use case.
There were a LOT of other apps out there - I remember buying several, such as astronomical tools - but you could take the machine out of it's box on Xmas day and be up and running for any regular office tasks.
We hooked those systems up to the old Motorola analogue mobile phones - we could get 2400 BPS data links from 70 miles offshore. Since the antennae for a formal radio system would have cost 10s of thousands of dollars for installation, and be repeated each time we needed to hire a vessel, then the price of the touchscreen didn't seem too unreasonable. We saved hundreds of thousands over the years that system was working!
Ahhh, memories. Xenix! X! Multiple overlapping windows! All so new then.
And with an $800 BoM, you'd have been up against a £400 Psion 5 (retail cost), which included all applications necessary (was a web browser considered necessary at the time? I honestly can't remember. I know I did do some web browsing on it, because it would connect well to my Sony mobile or Nokia Communicator ; but I honestly can't remember if the web browser was built in or one I chose)., a large installed base of users with their own applications from the 3- and 5- series and an established dealer network.
Oh, hang on - you priced things in dollars. American? Then no Psion dealer network. Maybe you'd have survived.
Useful, I'll agree. Not "necessary". I ran cables throughout the old house in the mid-1990s, and was getting a stable 100MBPS connection from any computer from about 1996 until we left in 2012. If I had a guest and I wanted to provide them with WiFi, I'd turn on the laptops WiFi card and the last time I did it, they could get half the connection speed that I had through the cable. I was considering running 1000-base, but would probably have left it until the previous cable was 20 years old before replacing it.
I used a touch screen with a stylus. You might think that they suck, but I'm perfectly happy with them. My Psion used one (and I never lost one!) and my last - or last-but-one - phone also had a stylus (which I also didn't lose, until I lost the phone itself). You might think that they suck, but that's a subjective opinion, not an objective fact.
Yeah ... in 2000 I objected so badly to replacing the AA cells (rechargeable or primary) EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It was such a pain in the arse having to go to any shop in the world and buy two batteries EVERY DAMNED MONTH. It's so much better having to carry a charger (and the panoply of adaptors for the 5 different sockets that I meet most months) with me and having to recharge the device several times a day.
When I discovered Symbian, I never felt the need to try a WinCE machine or a Palm machine. I just got on with using the applications and barely noticed the OS. Which is how it should be.
See above comments about the horrors of a monthly battery change (Either NiCads, NiMHs or primaries).
The technology to make effective "tablet" devices was available in the late 1990s - Psion did it. To this day, it's a mystery to the community of "Psioneers" why they stopped manufacturing them, or why they didn't sell the hardware division as a going concern when they restructured to become a software-only company. If they'd continued ... well, the world is full of "if onlys".
Crap resistive touchscreens were crap because they were crap. Good resistive touchscreens were good because they were good, not crap.
See up-thread for comments about the Psion 5 family. I forget who made the touchscreen - I know that the display was a Hitachi part, but I can't remember if you could get the touchscreen separately. That was a good part - and probably one of the highest cost items on the BoM to build the device. But it was also one of the major features of the device, and essential to it's success.
[SHRUG]
When you want accuracy from fingertips, you use an implement. Be that a dissecting needle and forceps (I spend several hours each working day at the microscope - it shows), or a stylus, or a keyboard. Fingertips weren't designed for precision work. They evolved to their current form while we were still making tools by banging rocks together. By the time we started to make needles and fabrics, our ancestors were already "anatomically modern humans".
I used Psion 5s and 5mxs for about 10 years until supplies dried up - during the period that this device was designed. Applications and an excellent (for a pocket device) keyboard made the Psion ; the stylus wasn't a problem.
13 years later, the tablet market is bringing out some devices that are comparable with the Psion 5, but are all severely crippled by being hooked to an app purchase "store", instead of providing adequate functionality out of the box. I spent about 5 years after Psion stopped producing the 5s using ebaY to get spares to repair mine (the screens were not robust!) before reluctantly giving up on them. But that month of battery life ... irreplaceable.