Exactly -- much like, if one were to try to break into someone's house, one would first check the doorknob, then look for a key-hider, and then look for unlocked windows.;)
If you're able to fix the bug, that's great. For most users, though, that isn't an option. The options are:
- Free software, free support from surly individuals who cast aspersions on your intelligence and competency, while declining to actually listen enough to help you until you find the rare gem that DOES help you. The existence of that one generous developer in the crowd of jerks is not enough to counteract the generally unhelpful community. (If the community wanted to have good support, they would have done so, rather than being jerks.)
- Non-Free software, no support. However, the product is widely enough used, and intended to be marketed, and thus has a fair amout of developers actively maintaining it, as well as some focus groups and likely beta testing groups which will have caught many bugs. Most importantly, fixing these bugs is imperative if the company wants to sell more of them, so you (as a customer) are in some ways more likely to get your problems solved (eventually).
Now, clearly, both of these are somewhat exaggerated extremes. Many free software groups have very lively, responsive, and fanatical support groups. Many commercial tools, esp those not made by large companies, can't/won't spend money on serious bugfixing... and often the fix isn't released until version N+1. However, from the perspective of a consumer, not having to put up with jerks is a big plus.
I don't care about the reasons for keeping this from us, nor whether the current administration is the same as the old, or more (or less) truthful than the old one.
I care about how to prevent this. What can I do? Are senators and representatives in on this? How can I make an argument about this, over the phone to some staffer, which doesn't make me sounds like a lunatic, or someone who's only upset that they can't torrent the latest movies? What concerns can I highlight which will motivate OTHER people to contact their representatives? How can I pitch this in such a way that my representative will be inclined to listen to my reasoning?
I don't mind calling my reps, I just have no idea what the hell to say.
The fact that the internet may "route around it" doesn't help when you're in the "damaged" portion and getting blackholed. Nor does it help when every other major country has adopted similar "damage".
I must agree. It would be awesome if one could have a "screen"-like functionality with X. For all I know, it's already there, and I just don't know how to use it...
Does the benefit of special characters in passwords derive from their actual use or in the expansion of the possible character set? If the possible character set includes the special characters, must they then be used in order to gain the advantage?
If one is going to crack passwords, one may need to (eventually) test the key space. If your passphrase is in the "easy" part of the key space (such as if you don't use special characters), it will be found very early on. So, yes -- you must use special characters (and not in a prescribed pattern) in order to put your key in the larger portion of the key space.
( (easy to crack)........... hard to crack...... )
One can think of the key space as a Venn diagram. If your key falls in the "easy" to crack space, it's much more vulnerable than if it's in the hard to crack space. As someone mentioned above, though, you really needto ensure the passphrase was random: if you're just replacing some letters in words with numbers, that will be crackable by a Markov chaining attack.
We can also look at our key space in terms of what tactic can be used to crack it:
While I agree that MW and MW2 will have (and I want!) an M rating, most of that is because you're spewing lead at high velocities in a semi-realistic manner. Most of us know we signed on for that when we bought the game. If there's an option to skip JUST the things that most excite our urge to retch, I'd be glad for it -- but appreciate not having to restart an entire campaign if I decide something was too much (or too little).
would you watch a movie which featured soldiers killing civilians with no consequences and then going on to have an exciting adventure killing other people?
The successes of movies like Grosse Pointe Blank, Assassins, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, as well as numerous other movies about murderous psychopaths, is evidence that we (collectively) WILL watch movies like that.
My impression of the level was that you were controlling Villainous avatars for that particular mission. "Bad people", as you say, doing bad things, not members of the "good guys" slaughtering civilians.
I don't normally enjoy playing a villainous character. I could only stomache the Death Knight starting stuff in WoW because I knew that the lore led to the redemption of your characer. I don't want to play GTA (and don't really even enjoy watching it), despite my acknowledgement of its masterful gameplay and open-endedness. I did not enjoy the Hitman series of games (though I liked the overall lore, and even the movie).
What bothers me about this is not that it will be soldiers doing bad things, but that I will (I assume) directly controlling them in the process. That makes my innards squirm. I'm mostly OK with gratuitous violence in a game, but I think this is one level I will not enjoy.
The video was revolting, horriffic. It reminded me of the credits sequence of Modern Warfare (COD4) -- where (I trust no one reading this article is vulnerable to spoilers) your viewpoint is that of a man who is executed. That was a horriffic sequence as well, and I can't watch it a second time. Similarly, this level is the same way.
However, it appears to be a playable level, and that makes me even more squeamish. I'm OK with watching the depiction -- after all, these ARE villains -- but I do not think that I will enjoy PLAYING that level. I'll be happy if I can skip it. There's some line inside my head that makes me believe I'll NOT enjoy slaughtering avatars of innocent bystanders, in much the same way that I felt tremendously guilty whenever I managed to fail missions in Rainbow Six with extreme prejudice.
Powerful storytelling tool, though. I just hope it's optional. I do not look forward to 10 minutes (more like 30-40 counting re-attempts) of gunning down civilians. Fortunately, it looks like the LATER parts of the level are versus armed guards... somehow that's more palatable. Perhaps the opening part of the level is on autopilot, and you're not controlling the character until it's time to fight the heavily armed response team. I can hope.
You can get one on Ebay for about $25, and probably another $25 in battery/charger/etc costs. It has very few features.
A more powerful/featureful e-ink phone could be pretty cool, I agree. I don't think the form factor is enough for me to want to use it for reading, though.
Many of your durability and other complaints stem from a conflation of book and reader. In an e-reader situation, your books are merely data. In theory, they're infinitely durable, never run out of power, can't be damaged, etc. (DRM makes that less true.) The durability, battery, and other complaints are not about the book but the READER.
For a physical book, your "book" is the text, and your "reader" is a stack of paper. The book is not DRM'ed, but is locked to a single reader. You must buy a new reader for every book, and while they are durable and long-lasting, they take up a lot of space and mass.
Most of your concerns about e-books relate to the artificial scarcity and lack of durability built into them by the current crop of books. These concerns could be met if books used an open standard: in 30 years, someone could write code to read/display the latex or xml code that a document was written in, and display it however you wanted (assuming one took care to make sure the bits were stored on media that was readable). Let me try and give counterpoints to some of your concerns:
Battery: I agree, longer battery life would be nicer. Recharges via solar or other power would be nifty. However, the several-day lifespan of an e-book reader is generally more than the time it takes me to read a book, and I have many opportunities to recharge. My phone gets less battery life.
Space: Sure, it fits in your pocket. How about two books? Three? Several novels, a newspaper, a reference book, and Wikipedia? (I exaggerate with Wikipedia, but I suspect not for long.) E-books scale VERY well, whereas physical books do not. I have five bookshelves full of books, and some are stacked two-deep. This makes finding a particular book (or determining if I have one) a potentially challenging process. An electronic library is searchable, and there's no need to worry about where they are. I can also download a large archive of books from Project Gutenberg and have a library full of classic works which would be either hard to find or impractical to store on my own.
Durability: The reader is un-durable, compared to a paper reader. However, the data on the reader is, presumably, easily duplicated. In the case of a fire or other catastrophic accident (hurricane, etc), your e-book collection can be (in theory) much more easily replaced. The best-case scenario (broken reader) is much worse, but the worst-case scenario can be far better. (Again, DRM makes this harder to do, but if most of your books are free, unencumbered, or cracked, it's very viable.)
Obsolescence: Project Gutenberg (and equivalents) make me feel that many books will not be obsolete. The obsolecense is a product of the DRM on the books being sold, not a fault of the reader. Open formats (Mobipocket? PDF? XML? Latex? Plain text?) are things which anyone can implement, whether this year or in a century, in order to be readable on Their Favorite Platform (whether than be Kindle, Nook, Apple Tablet, Google REading Platform, the GutenBook, your PC, or a voice synthesizer in your ipod).
DRM: Burn, burn in hell. I wish there were none... but if the books were cheap ($1? $3?) and still transferrable between people (and back-up-able), I'd hate it less. Fortunately, Project Gutenberg and the Baen free library make me believe that quality free content is still available. I'd even pay for an unencumbered e-book, even if the same could be found on TPB, if I felt it were a good book at the right price.
Disaster: In case of fire, flood, tornado, or alien invasion, you can take the memory chip you've socked away in your safe (or offsite) and re-load your e-library into your e-book, enabling you to carry survival guides, maps, the Boy Scout Handbook, your comics, and your entire collection of Star Wars novels with you as you book it to safety in the woods.
I'm looking forward to having e-books that are annotateable by hand (drawings, mustaches on pictures, scribbled notes for pages, etc). I suspect some readers already let you, and I either don't know of (or can't afford) them.:D I would absolutely LOVE the ability to buy (or download) the entire archives of some of my favourite (or prospective new) webcomics, also.
If I felt a petition was necessary to bring an issue to a vote (whether I supported it or not), and signed said petition, that's an expression of even more sincere (and public) support than a bumper sticker, sign on my yard, or banner on my roof. If I sign a petition, I don't care who knows it, because the petition is a way of explicitly saying to the world, "I think this needs to be voted on".... I don't imagine myself signing a petition for something which I didn't support, though. I'd prefer that things I don't support never got on a ballot.;)
you're at the mercy of whichever user happens to click the 'host' button instead of the 'join' button. If they disconnect in a hissy fit because you fragged them, game over. If they've got a shit connection, or their roommate fires up bittorrent, expect big pings as 32 players flood this poor sap's connection past breaking point
Wrong.
If the host leaves, the rest of the players will continue their game. The first MW2 preview video I watched showed this in action. Play paused, a new host was negotiated, and play continued. (I can't comment on what happens when the siblings are torrenting.)
I'm pissed about not having reliable servers to connect to (to avoid "random assclowns", as someone else put it), but at least you don't have to worry as much about hosts dying.
You stare at the mechanical version of yourself which has just been switched on. YOU still exist. The mechanical replacement in front if you has your memories and thinks as if it were you, but now being a third party observer I think it's plainly obvious that the entity standing in front of you is not you.
Is it not? In the hypothetical Star Trek universe, are people no longer the same person after Transportation (in which their matter is destroyed completely and rebuilt at a different time and location)? The only thing preventing use of Transport for cloning (of an exact duplicate) is, as far as I know, ethical rather than technological (since they've had accidents that have cloned people). If one person steps into one door, and two people step out the other, who's to say which is "you"? If a perfect mind transfer were possible, I think the question's moot. If we put Stephen Hawking in a brand new robotic body, I suspect he'd be just as brilliant.
If minds are information, it's not hard to imagine that, someday, technology will exist to allow us to make perfect copies -- just the way we now can with music. At (or before) that point, our whole concept of what it means to be a person will need to evolve. Accelerando delves into this in a more mindblowing and complete manner than I can.;)
If you knew your current body were dying of cancer, and you could transfer your consciousness to a machine next to your body, after having done so I believe the consciousness in the machine would consider itself "you" even as it watched its former shell die. Copying before death would be... confusing, at the least. I would love to see some chess grandmaster do it, though.;)
it's not nearly as bad as the myriad names for "*" (asterisk, star, splat, bang, etc)
"Bang" is another name for the exclamation point (!), not for the asterisk. Or, that's what the Jargon File told me when I was first getting on the internet. ( http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/b/bang.html ) I've never heard it used to describe an asterisk.
I may not feel the need for using all ten fingers, but I have wanted to use multiple mouse pointers at the same time. Select some files, drag them, then use another mouse (or pen, or touchpad) to manipulate windows (or virtual desktops) until I can drop them on the one I want. Or, move and resize a window at the same time. Perhaps you want to move two windows at once?
I currently only use one pointing device, and it works fine (especially now that I am feverishly addicted to multiple virtual desktops on multiple monitors)... but, when I used to have both a pen tablet and a mouse attached, I used to wonder why I couldn't use both at the same time. Currently, Windows only really acknowledges one mouse at a time: you can use two, but they move the same pointer. If you could have a left handed and right handed pointer, there's a whole bunch of extra things you can do.
If you have trouble imagining how you might use this, consider multiple monitors. I know people who have felt that they neither wanted nor could use multiple monitors... and only tried them because I said, "trust me, it's like dial-up versus broadband:once you've tried multiple monitors, you will not be willing to give it up." I sincerely believe that using multiple pointers (even if not my fingers) would have a similar effect.
So true. One of the best dates my wife and I had was when my mother in law watched the baby, and we went to In-N-Out (~$10), and then to the theater, where we spent ~$3 on our tickets. We both laugh about it being a cheap date, but we both think it was pretty awesome.
He could easily put a bluetooth dongle on one, and have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard when he wants to type quickly, and yet still pick it up and walk around his classroom.
The point is, he obviously feels he needs it. Having recorded lecture notes (to put on the web, to save for later review, etc) is fantastic. He can even record audio, if he wants, and post that too.
He might jsut prefer being able to show powerpoint, or use some math software on the screen.
That said, I loved the massive 6-chalkboard setups at my uni. They ensured the prof didn't lecture faster than we could take notes.:D
If speeding had a uniform, predictable fine, which were not oppressive, MANY people would just pay it as their "I'd like to get to work faster" toll. Many wouldn't like that, though, but if there were no worrying about whether you'd get "caught" (or, more accurately, no way to avoid it), there'd be fewer people speeding, as it would cost money to do it.
I'd prefer higher speed limits on highways, though.
Let's focus our shock and outrage on the very idea that our government has evolved to the point where it cannot even propose a law without first undertaking a study funded by taxes which would otherwise employ several hundred people for a full year.
While I agree that the price sounds excessive, the idea of a study (paid for by taxes) preceding New Taxes sounds fundamentally sound. An alternative is to not do any study, and have an even less-informed set of laws being made. As for the price... wow. It does sound about an order of magnitude too high.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, that's a really good idea. I've always had a hard time doing extended cardio at the gym, I'll keep that in mind. Thanks!
Exactly -- much like, if one were to try to break into someone's house, one would first check the doorknob, then look for a key-hider, and then look for unlocked windows. ;)
If you're able to fix the bug, that's great. For most users, though, that isn't an option. The options are:
- Free software, free support from surly individuals who cast aspersions on your intelligence and competency, while declining to actually listen enough to help you until you find the rare gem that DOES help you. The existence of that one generous developer in the crowd of jerks is not enough to counteract the generally unhelpful community. (If the community wanted to have good support, they would have done so, rather than being jerks.)
- Non-Free software, no support. However, the product is widely enough used, and intended to be marketed, and thus has a fair amout of developers actively maintaining it, as well as some focus groups and likely beta testing groups which will have caught many bugs. Most importantly, fixing these bugs is imperative if the company wants to sell more of them, so you (as a customer) are in some ways more likely to get your problems solved (eventually).
Now, clearly, both of these are somewhat exaggerated extremes. Many free software groups have very lively, responsive, and fanatical support groups. Many commercial tools, esp those not made by large companies, can't/won't spend money on serious bugfixing... and often the fix isn't released until version N+1. However, from the perspective of a consumer, not having to put up with jerks is a big plus.
I don't care about the reasons for keeping this from us, nor whether the current administration is the same as the old, or more (or less) truthful than the old one.
I care about how to prevent this. What can I do? Are senators and representatives in on this? How can I make an argument about this, over the phone to some staffer, which doesn't make me sounds like a lunatic, or someone who's only upset that they can't torrent the latest movies? What concerns can I highlight which will motivate OTHER people to contact their representatives? How can I pitch this in such a way that my representative will be inclined to listen to my reasoning?
I don't mind calling my reps, I just have no idea what the hell to say.
The fact that the internet may "route around it" doesn't help when you're in the "damaged" portion and getting blackholed. Nor does it help when every other major country has adopted similar "damage".
I must agree. It would be awesome if one could have a "screen"-like functionality with X. For all I know, it's already there, and I just don't know how to use it...
If one is going to crack passwords, one may need to (eventually) test the key space. If your passphrase is in the "easy" part of the key space (such as if you don't use special characters), it will be found very early on. So, yes -- you must use special characters (and not in a prescribed pattern) in order to put your key in the larger portion of the key space.
( (easy to crack) ........... hard to crack ...... )
One can think of the key space as a Venn diagram. If your key falls in the "easy" to crack space, it's much more vulnerable than if it's in the hard to crack space. As someone mentioned above, though, you really needto ensure the passphrase was random: if you're just replacing some letters in words with numbers, that will be crackable by a Markov chaining attack.
We can also look at our key space in terms of what tactic can be used to crack it:
( ( (easy: dictionary attack) ... medium: Markov chaining attack ) .... hard: brute force attack )
That's interesting. Can one accuse politicians of copyright infringement, and do so without breaking laws?
While I agree that MW and MW2 will have (and I want!) an M rating, most of that is because you're spewing lead at high velocities in a semi-realistic manner. Most of us know we signed on for that when we bought the game. If there's an option to skip JUST the things that most excite our urge to retch, I'd be glad for it -- but appreciate not having to restart an entire campaign if I decide something was too much (or too little).
The successes of movies like Grosse Pointe Blank, Assassins, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, as well as numerous other movies about murderous psychopaths, is evidence that we (collectively) WILL watch movies like that.
My impression of the level was that you were controlling Villainous avatars for that particular mission. "Bad people", as you say, doing bad things, not members of the "good guys" slaughtering civilians.
I don't normally enjoy playing a villainous character. I could only stomache the Death Knight starting stuff in WoW because I knew that the lore led to the redemption of your characer. I don't want to play GTA (and don't really even enjoy watching it), despite my acknowledgement of its masterful gameplay and open-endedness. I did not enjoy the Hitman series of games (though I liked the overall lore, and even the movie).
What bothers me about this is not that it will be soldiers doing bad things, but that I will (I assume) directly controlling them in the process. That makes my innards squirm. I'm mostly OK with gratuitous violence in a game, but I think this is one level I will not enjoy.
The video was revolting, horriffic. It reminded me of the credits sequence of Modern Warfare (COD4) -- where (I trust no one reading this article is vulnerable to spoilers) your viewpoint is that of a man who is executed. That was a horriffic sequence as well, and I can't watch it a second time. Similarly, this level is the same way.
However, it appears to be a playable level, and that makes me even more squeamish. I'm OK with watching the depiction -- after all, these ARE villains -- but I do not think that I will enjoy PLAYING that level. I'll be happy if I can skip it. There's some line inside my head that makes me believe I'll NOT enjoy slaughtering avatars of innocent bystanders, in much the same way that I felt tremendously guilty whenever I managed to fail missions in Rainbow Six with extreme prejudice.
Powerful storytelling tool, though. I just hope it's optional. I do not look forward to 10 minutes (more like 30-40 counting re-attempts) of gunning down civilians. Fortunately, it looks like the LATER parts of the level are versus armed guards ... somehow that's more palatable. Perhaps the opening part of the level is on autopilot, and you're not controlling the character until it's time to fight the heavily armed response team. I can hope.
There is a cell phone with an e-ink screen: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/03/29/review_motorola_motofone_f3/
You can get one on Ebay for about $25, and probably another $25 in battery/charger/etc costs. It has very few features.
A more powerful/featureful e-ink phone could be pretty cool, I agree. I don't think the form factor is enough for me to want to use it for reading, though.
Many of your durability and other complaints stem from a conflation of book and reader. In an e-reader situation, your books are merely data. In theory, they're infinitely durable, never run out of power, can't be damaged, etc. (DRM makes that less true.) The durability, battery, and other complaints are not about the book but the READER.
For a physical book, your "book" is the text, and your "reader" is a stack of paper. The book is not DRM'ed, but is locked to a single reader. You must buy a new reader for every book, and while they are durable and long-lasting, they take up a lot of space and mass.
Most of your concerns about e-books relate to the artificial scarcity and lack of durability built into them by the current crop of books. These concerns could be met if books used an open standard: in 30 years, someone could write code to read/display the latex or xml code that a document was written in, and display it however you wanted (assuming one took care to make sure the bits were stored on media that was readable). Let me try and give counterpoints to some of your concerns:
Battery: I agree, longer battery life would be nicer. Recharges via solar or other power would be nifty. However, the several-day lifespan of an e-book reader is generally more than the time it takes me to read a book, and I have many opportunities to recharge. My phone gets less battery life.
Space: Sure, it fits in your pocket. How about two books? Three? Several novels, a newspaper, a reference book, and Wikipedia? (I exaggerate with Wikipedia, but I suspect not for long.) E-books scale VERY well, whereas physical books do not. I have five bookshelves full of books, and some are stacked two-deep. This makes finding a particular book (or determining if I have one) a potentially challenging process. An electronic library is searchable, and there's no need to worry about where they are. I can also download a large archive of books from Project Gutenberg and have a library full of classic works which would be either hard to find or impractical to store on my own.
Durability: The reader is un-durable, compared to a paper reader. However, the data on the reader is, presumably, easily duplicated. In the case of a fire or other catastrophic accident (hurricane, etc), your e-book collection can be (in theory) much more easily replaced. The best-case scenario (broken reader) is much worse, but the worst-case scenario can be far better. (Again, DRM makes this harder to do, but if most of your books are free, unencumbered, or cracked, it's very viable.)
Obsolescence: Project Gutenberg (and equivalents) make me feel that many books will not be obsolete. The obsolecense is a product of the DRM on the books being sold, not a fault of the reader. Open formats (Mobipocket? PDF? XML? Latex? Plain text?) are things which anyone can implement, whether this year or in a century, in order to be readable on Their Favorite Platform (whether than be Kindle, Nook, Apple Tablet, Google REading Platform, the GutenBook, your PC, or a voice synthesizer in your ipod).
DRM: Burn, burn in hell. I wish there were none ... but if the books were cheap ($1? $3?) and still transferrable between people (and back-up-able), I'd hate it less. Fortunately, Project Gutenberg and the Baen free library make me believe that quality free content is still available. I'd even pay for an unencumbered e-book, even if the same could be found on TPB, if I felt it were a good book at the right price.
Disaster: In case of fire, flood, tornado, or alien invasion, you can take the memory chip you've socked away in your safe (or offsite) and re-load your e-library into your e-book, enabling you to carry survival guides, maps, the Boy Scout Handbook, your comics, and your entire collection of Star Wars novels with you as you book it to safety in the woods.
I'm looking forward to having e-books that are annotateable by hand (drawings, mustaches on pictures, scribbled notes for pages, etc). I suspect some readers already let you, and I either don't know of (or can't afford) them. :D I would absolutely LOVE the ability to buy (or download) the entire archives of some of my favourite (or prospective new) webcomics, also.
If I felt a petition was necessary to bring an issue to a vote (whether I supported it or not), and signed said petition, that's an expression of even more sincere (and public) support than a bumper sticker, sign on my yard, or banner on my roof. If I sign a petition, I don't care who knows it, because the petition is a way of explicitly saying to the world, "I think this needs to be voted on". ... I don't imagine myself signing a petition for something which I didn't support, though. I'd prefer that things I don't support never got on a ballot. ;)
Wrong.
If the host leaves, the rest of the players will continue their game. The first MW2 preview video I watched showed this in action. Play paused, a new host was negotiated, and play continued. (I can't comment on what happens when the siblings are torrenting.)
I'm pissed about not having reliable servers to connect to (to avoid "random assclowns", as someone else put it), but at least you don't have to worry as much about hosts dying.
Is it not? In the hypothetical Star Trek universe, are people no longer the same person after Transportation (in which their matter is destroyed completely and rebuilt at a different time and location)? The only thing preventing use of Transport for cloning (of an exact duplicate) is, as far as I know, ethical rather than technological (since they've had accidents that have cloned people). If one person steps into one door, and two people step out the other, who's to say which is "you"? If a perfect mind transfer were possible, I think the question's moot. If we put Stephen Hawking in a brand new robotic body, I suspect he'd be just as brilliant.
If minds are information, it's not hard to imagine that, someday, technology will exist to allow us to make perfect copies -- just the way we now can with music. At (or before) that point, our whole concept of what it means to be a person will need to evolve. Accelerando delves into this in a more mindblowing and complete manner than I can. ;)
If you knew your current body were dying of cancer, and you could transfer your consciousness to a machine next to your body, after having done so I believe the consciousness in the machine would consider itself "you" even as it watched its former shell die. Copying before death would be ... confusing, at the least. I would love to see some chess grandmaster do it, though. ;)
"Bang" is another name for the exclamation point (!), not for the asterisk. Or, that's what the Jargon File told me when I was first getting on the internet. ( http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/b/bang.html ) I've never heard it used to describe an asterisk.
I may not feel the need for using all ten fingers, but I have wanted to use multiple mouse pointers at the same time. Select some files, drag them, then use another mouse (or pen, or touchpad) to manipulate windows (or virtual desktops) until I can drop them on the one I want. Or, move and resize a window at the same time. Perhaps you want to move two windows at once?
I currently only use one pointing device, and it works fine (especially now that I am feverishly addicted to multiple virtual desktops on multiple monitors)... but, when I used to have both a pen tablet and a mouse attached, I used to wonder why I couldn't use both at the same time. Currently, Windows only really acknowledges one mouse at a time: you can use two, but they move the same pointer. If you could have a left handed and right handed pointer, there's a whole bunch of extra things you can do.
If you have trouble imagining how you might use this, consider multiple monitors. I know people who have felt that they neither wanted nor could use multiple monitors... and only tried them because I said, "trust me, it's like dial-up versus broadband:once you've tried multiple monitors, you will not be willing to give it up." I sincerely believe that using multiple pointers (even if not my fingers) would have a similar effect.
So true. One of the best dates my wife and I had was when my mother in law watched the baby, and we went to In-N-Out (~$10), and then to the theater, where we spent ~$3 on our tickets. We both laugh about it being a cheap date, but we both think it was pretty awesome.
Slates are LIGHT though.
He could easily put a bluetooth dongle on one, and have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard when he wants to type quickly, and yet still pick it up and walk around his classroom.
The point is, he obviously feels he needs it. Having recorded lecture notes (to put on the web, to save for later review, etc) is fantastic. He can even record audio, if he wants, and post that too.
He might jsut prefer being able to show powerpoint, or use some math software on the screen.
That said, I loved the massive 6-chalkboard setups at my uni. They ensured the prof didn't lecture faster than we could take notes. :D
If speeding had a uniform, predictable fine, which were not oppressive, MANY people would just pay it as their "I'd like to get to work faster" toll. Many wouldn't like that, though, but if there were no worrying about whether you'd get "caught" (or, more accurately, no way to avoid it), there'd be fewer people speeding, as it would cost money to do it.
I'd prefer higher speed limits on highways, though.
While I agree that the price sounds excessive, the idea of a study (paid for by taxes) preceding New Taxes sounds fundamentally sound. An alternative is to not do any study, and have an even less-informed set of laws being made. As for the price ... wow. It does sound about an order of magnitude too high.