I have the same reaction to music. When people come and address me I mute the music. I'll start working again and realize I'm not focused. I then unmute the music and everything goes to normal again.

A lot of it depends on your environment when you were growing up. If you always focused without music around there is a chance the music will have the adverse effect. Because my parents always listened to music I figure I must have gotten use to that.

There was two studies that I found interesting which I tried to find but with no luck:
One was about how humans react to environments with no sound. The conclusion was that humans don't deal with lack of sound very well.
Second was about the influence of music on learning and focus. There are many studies on this but I could not find the one I though was most relevant to my above comments.

So did this make the news because another company finally made it?

LOL. Link saved.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe this is tailored specifically for the BIO industry which makes me wonder why the title speaks of atoms since it doesn't appear to be the main focus of the technology.

Obviously this is a big deal if it makes it more affordable and available for bio researcher. It's like saying that going from computers taking whole floors of a building to them fitting in the palm of you hand isn't advancement or a big deal. I realize my comparison isn't fitting but you get what I'm speaking of.

Yes, I agree. There are bits and pieces that are already happening but a fully emerged experience is still no here. We aren't far which is very satisfying. I know some will say you can't compete with the power of a workstation and they would be right. After all the engineers at my company get to work with i7 4770 with 16gb of ram, 500gb SSD and $2000 NVidia Quadro video cards. Yes, $2000!!!

So obviously there are many exceptions but when talking about non specialized requirements it makes perfect sense especially that the processing power will continue to increase.

I think you nailed it. It should probably be used as external storage but there is value in having the H/W be used. Right now the processing power is not comparable to an i5 4570 but most users don't need that kind of processing power and as it moves forward it will improve as well. At the end of the day being able to replace one device to upgrade your whole world is kinda of neat and less wasteful. Currently in my household there are 10 separate processing units used regularly (2 tablets, 4 phones and 4 pcs). We could cut that down to 5 and possibly make better use of our existing equipment such as sound system and televisions.

Virtualization is making all kind of H/W compatibility issues an issue of the past so I figure it's just a matter of time before we see a merger between PCs and mobile devices

What if you could just dock your smart device and it's now a workstation? To some extend the docking station could act as a feature/performance extension of a smaller device. It wouldn't ruin the flow and would allow you to carry your same configuration/environment everywhere. I know some will counter with "Why not use the cloud?" but the fact is that the cloud doesn't give you the nice smooth response of client side access and you never know if you will have a decent internet access where you go.

Keep in mind that I'm aware our smart devices are not there yet but 10 years from now it will be a lot closer. The future of having one device do it all is in view. Any company that refuses to get on board with this will possibly miss the boat the same way MS did with the smart phones.

It requires a lot of courage, and an equal amount of stupidity to insult an officer. It's like poking the bear with a stick.

I didn't need a law to know it's a bad idea to be disrespectful to an officer outside a courtroom. They already have enough power to cause you grief if you do.

I didn't suggest it was an ideal solution but it does solve the input issue. The fact that it isn't ideal makes it that it won't happen. Fact is the technology is not useless but it's miss placed. Time will sort this out.

I'm not one of those /. users that will trash Windows because I'm a Linux or Apple fanboy, if anything I'm much closer to being a MS fanboy than any other.

The fact is that there's a lot more going on with the OS than says Linux. Half written registry keys can spell lots of trouble something Linux doesn't have to worry about.

As for disk recovery and consistency I'd like to get facts on that matter. Last I checked Linux is the preferred platform used in data centers as well as data devices.

Anytime you are writing you can corrupt data. Windows is easier to corrupt because it's bloated.

Shutting down the computer even in the middle of writing is the least of your concerns when you are trying to hide information from the authorities or someone else. What you want is to avoid the system being left in a logged in state.

Last I checked you can also reconfigured what your power button does. You can have it so it shutdowns. In some BIOS you can set it so it turns off "AT PSU" style which is an instant power off.

I agree. We've lost our focus if this is what the next important thing is.

Voice recognition is what comes to mind but some will say it's not private enough and they are right.

Holograms appear to be something coming down (although I'm not clear how) but is that going to be input friendly since there will be no feedback while typing mid air?

The there's those slim LCDs that can be rolled out, maybe a few years down the road we can make it work reliably.

So why are we building devices that aren't

It's based on statistics I presented in earlier comments but I guess you already forgot because you have no faith in anybody else than yourself. I would suggest you start working on your campaign since your government obviously suck and you have so much to offer (I'm not being offensive but rather honest. You should if it's that bad where you live)!

Prove it. I sent you many links showing the studies made to assess speed limit requirements. You're assuming your peers (other human beings) aren't doing their due diligence and that's a very poor argument. Just to recap 2 of the many metrics used:
1. The 85th percentile is one of the metrics used to assess compliance
2. Fatalities and injuries are used for assessing if the change is effective

Depends what you do. Office 97 was horrible by today's standard as it didn't deal with many content types which made creating marketing documents a nightmare. Open Office is fine but it too has it's limitations. As I stated in an earlier post, you can't put all users in the same basket, if you could then MS wouldn't sell any office software.