I don't know what planet you live on, but here on earth waves propagate through copper transmission lines at a speed on the order of about half the speed of light. The latency due to a copper cable with a .66 velocity factor over a 10km run is about .050 milliseconds. Considering the latency of the IP network that you're connected to is probably at least 50 ms to even the closest nodes, I doubt a 0.1% increase is going to bother you.

The biggest problem of copper is not latency, it's that you have to lay the fucking cable.

You missed my point. I never said handwriting recognition or a physical keyboard was a better option. If anything, my point was that handwriting recognition had no business replacing any kind of keyboard, hard or soft. Instead, stylus input is valuable as a free-form entry tool, for note-taking, sketching, or recording mathematical symbols.

I didn't mean to single out the iPad alone, I was more interested in pointing out a shortcoming of the tablet form factor as a whole. Tablets are great for certain roles, but they have no business in any task that requires a large amount of ASCII text entry. If you're going to be writing code or typing a term paper, it's hard to argue against a physical keyboard.

Stylus input, just as keyboard input or touchscreen input, has a place in consumer electronics. However, it needs to be viewed as an augmentation rather than a replacement. In the past, there were attempts to use the stylus to replace the keyboard or mouse, and I think the historic failures of the stylus as an input device have caused the tablet industry to stubbornly refuse to include a valuable and appropriate form of input. Do you not think the iPad would be an even more appealing device if it included a pressure sensitive stylus? Touch could still serve as the primary input, but the stylus would be there for jotting down notes, drawings, or formulae. I think that would be pretty sweet.

I don't own an iPad, but I have used friends' iPads on several occasions. They pretty neat little devices, and I think they have their role as a consumer electronics device and in certain industries (medicine, etc). However, text entry is an obvious failure in my opinion. Touchscreen keyboards make sense in a smartphone form factor where one can hold the phone and type with their thumbs. But a larger tablet has to be laid on a surface or else all you can do is hunt and peck with a single finger. It's fine for a URL or a word or two, but typing more than that is a chore at best.

Real-time handwriting recognition is kind of misguided, if you need a lot of ASCII text, then you ought to be entering data with a physical keyboard. But if you need a flexible and efficient manner of recording data in a tablet form factor, handwriting is the only way to go. You can do the handwriting recognition after the fact if you need to at all. Styluses shouldn't be viewed as a replacement for text entry, but an augmentation for when free-form entry makes sense like note-taking, sketching, etc.

Good Information on history and science of earthquakes in Virginia

I found interesting that the chances of a quake in excess of 4.75 magnitude in Virginia over 100 years are 10-20%. This quake was over ten times as powerful at a 5.9.

I understand the natural instinct for Californians to be dismissive, but this was the largest quake in the recorded history of Virginia, and the strongest on the east coast in over 100 years. The media is over-hyping it for sure, but it is historically and scientifically significant. Also, keep in mind that buildings on the east coast are not designed to withstand seismic events to the same extent as those in California, and are on the whole MUCH older than west coast buildings.

Good Virginia Earthquake Information

I wish I had mod points, because this quake was definitely NOT in Northern Virginia. Sure it was felt there, it was quite significant even here in Frederick, MD, but the quake was centered in Mineral, VA, just outside of the Richmond, VA metro area, which is very distinctly NOT Northern Virginia.

This. As a veteran of the US armed forces and campaign in Afghanistan, I'd also like to stress that "following orders" is not a free pass. Every member of the US armed forces has not just the right, but also the DUTY to willfully disobey unlawful orders. Every single service member is sworn to support and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign AND domestic, including, but not limited to, officers and NCOs ordering the murder of innocent civilians.

But the school aged population of over 50 million in the United States is about 7 times larger than the prisoner population of about 7 million. And it seems reasonable to assume that educating a person is more resource demanding than detaining a person. The fact that the amount spend on prisons is even on the same order of magnitude as the amount spent on schools is more than a little disconcerting to me.

When I first saw the title of the thread, my initial reaction was "How the hell is there dark matter in Minnesota? Did they find Nibbler's litter box or something?"

I agree with your sentiment, but you used a couple bad examples. You've got the Corvette all wrong in particular.

The Corvette is considered crap on the world stage simply because American sports cars carry a stigma internationally. A much better car can be had for the money? The modern C5 and C6 Corvettes are considered some of the best values in the sports car world. They offer near-supercar level performance rivaling that of $150-200k European cars for a measly $50-60k. Not to mention the Corvette has a tremendous racing pedigree; the C5 and C6 Corvettes are some of the most successful cars in the history of international road racing.

Does the Corvette suffer from a lack of polish and build quality? Sure, but considering the price-performance return of a Corvette, you can't expect it to be upholstered with the skin from an endangered species or something.

There are plenty of examples of your initial sentiment, but I assure you the Corvette is not one of them.

As long as the per-byte rate is in line with current costs, I don't see the problem with it. Moving bits costs money, and moving more bits costs more money. I've always thought broadband providers should behave more like public utilities given their government endorsed monopoly of the infrastructure.

If we paid by the byte, it would eliminate the need for arbitrary data caps. If I want to pull down a terabyte in a week, I can. I just pay more than my neighbor who only downloaded a few GB in that same week. That seems fair, right?

The problem though, as it always is with telcos, is that the pricing will NOT be fair. The cable companies in particular are trying desperately to make a grab for the lost revenue in their PPV and other cable TV cash cows as people opt for cheaper alternatives like Netflix.

Why is the parent modded informative? While the antibacterials used in soap are not really an antibiotic, the rest of the post is wrong. Most antibacterial soaps contain triclosan, which when used in concentrations it is use in soaps decidedly does NOT kill on contact and merely inhibits reproduction of the bacteria cells.

Unlike commercial hand sanitizers that usually utilize ethanol to kill on contact, the triclosan used in antibacterial soaps is relatively simple for bacterial populations to develop resistance against.