"addicted to the Stratosphere's slide-out keyboard, which enables me to type much faster than a touchscreen"

Perhaps it is better when your typing speed isn't greater than your mental speed. Slow down your fingers and speed up your brain- you'll see that you need to make some changes. The phone is the least important.

at least to /. readers who seem to think that Friday surgery victims are 44 percent more likely to die than ... well who?

I assume that this is compared to other people having surgery.

So if those people have a .01% chance of dying, the Friday people have a .0144% chance of dying.

Does that take some of the drama out of the story or do you still not understand it?

So after investing 326 hours mastering Scratch. Where does one find a similar, more powerful language that builds upon what has been learned?

Permission to send an email is meaningless if there is no indication he will read it. Presumably he has a small army of people handling corporate and personal communication. Let's look at the economics of his reading your special message:

If we assume he will be earning $1B this year (argue if you will, I don't care), and he works 200 days, that means he makes $5M/day or $625K/hour or around $10K/minute. He gets paid $50,000 to take a dump during working hours.

Now here's your $100 message. Does he really want to waste $20,000 worth of his time reading it?

A bright, handsome young man joined our Mensa computer group in the early 80s. We were mostly hackers and programmers and we swapped a lot of software. Just curiosity; we'd run a program a few times to see how it worked. We'd disassemble it to figure out how the clever parts were done. And we'd move on to the next batch of software at next months meeting.

The young man seemed to come from nowhere and was instantly very popular. After a while I discovered he was printing labels for his 5" floppy disks and selling the software. He even set up a nice office downtown in our US city for this business. We were close, and he wasn't ashamed to show me his operation. I was stunned at his brash lack of morals.

But he went on to explain that he was from Ireland. The money was not for him, but for the IRA. He was proud to contribute, and it became clear that he was a hard core supporter and a patriot. But all I could think of was that the already dirty money would be going to buy guns & powder and escalate the violence.

He disappeared as mysteriously as he appeared- altogether staying less than 8 months in our city.

I hope I never have to do research in a paper book again.
No random access, useless index, no xref, no links, no instant glossary...

The books I studied in school weighed far more than a tablet, cost nearly the same, and offered far less. A tablet could contain 1000 such books and provide pulp fiction too if I wanted that. Not to mention that the tablet provides the internet, Wikipedia, other media and access to all my friends and associates.

The only real books I keep are those that have not been digitized or are very rare. OK, some have value and I'm not going to burn them. It's the same philosophy that helps me to decide which LP records, audio tapes, and video tapes to keep. Once they are properly digitized, the old media is out of here.

I'm a writer. Unlike those of the past who refused to learn to type or use a computer, my feeling is that the technology is irrelevant- it's the story, stupid. If you read it from an illuminated parchment or a pixellated screen or the wall of China, what difference does it make?

I do keep a paper book in the bathroom, just in case the other paper runs out.
Take that you paper snobs!

"the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies."

                              Just like humans!

I have to question the association with size & smarts. 100 years ago in the age of eugenics, there was an effort to measure people- individuals and ethnic groups, and to draw conclusions based on those measurements. There was a general assumption that a large head (and presumably brain) indicated an intelligent person. However, one source that I found from around 1950 stated that the largest brain ever recorded was that of an idiot.

Has this changed? Is there evidence now that size = smarts? Is this true for animals as well as humans? The most recent I had heard (probably 1990s) was that a large brain in relation to body size might indicate intelligence in some species.

So I'm googling around today and this question looks even more complicated, however this
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-brain-size-matter
agrees with most that size alone is meaningless.

Add to that the already debunked 'smaller gut' significance and what's left?

This experiment just looks stupid to me; something that a small brained scientist might try.

This is what we want in our working computers. Not our educational tools.

Long ago, in the days of the Apple ][, there was a computer emulator called the Visible Computer 6502. It was a graphical representation of a 6502 processor along with its registers and IO ports. You could program it in assembly language and watch it execute the code. Top speed was probably about 5 cycles per second, but you could slow it down for a better look at program execution, or you could step thru one cycle at a time.

This was an intimate look at the inner workings of a computer that a 9 year old could appreciate. It gave insights that elude college graduates today.

If someone will use Raspberry Pi to demonstrate this elemental relationship between hardware and software in a visually compelling format, then it will have served a revolutionary purpose and millions will see computers in a new light.

speed power expandability not required

Can the police (in some jurisdiction) subpoena the video when it may give evidence against me? Can they punish me for destroying the evidence? Can I hide the video unit so that they won't know I have it? Do any of these units broadcast a signal that can be detected by law enforcement or others? Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost over night?

disclaimer: I'm a good boy and haven't had an incident in decades, but just in case...

Why is this comment attached to WEST Antarctica?

An intrepid outdoorsman went exploring for the day. From his cabin he walked south five miles, then turned west and walked another 8 miles. He saw nothing of interest until then when he discovered a big scary bear. He paused long enough to take some pictures from a safe distance with his new Nikon camera with a 300mm lens. He walked the five miles back to the cabin to edit the new photos on his Mac PowerBook.

What color was the bear?

"This makes Bee Venom almost seven times more valuable than Gold, which, in comparison, is worth only about 53 Dollars per 1 gram."

So it costs the same as ink for my printer, data for my cellphone, gas for my car (soon), and clean drinking water (later).

I'm having a little trouble visualizing this concept.
I can imagine North, or South Antarctica, but those don't seem very useful either.

Yeah, we produce a lot of methane here too.
I can see how it might kill off some species.
Put a cork in it, people!

I'm concerned about the cost of privacy:

  "because the site is encrypted, donors who worry about being identified as giving to any particularly controversial group can do so without being identified."

This sounds great except that it leaves a wide opening for mischief. How is this money accounted for?

  - - -

consider this true tale of crime and abuse of trust:

Our city has a well respected consumer organization created and run by a charismatic attorney. They've done a lot of good over the years and many of us have donated to them. Last year we discovered convincing evidence that the founder has been skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars and engaging in other businesses with organization money, etc. The money trail is convoluted, obscured deliberately and through bad accounting practices. Much needed data has been destroyed. It is difficult to prosecute the offender without solid data. Good people are willing to carry on the work, but the organization is in legal limbo.

  - - -

EFF has earned a lot of respect, but donating under these double secret conditions is like putting your money into a black box, hoping it will get where it should. Accountability is critical but difficult under these conditions. It's a conflict between the openness we expect from businesses and the privacy we desire in these situations. The Open Source Community is perhaps in the best position to work out a model system. If so this concept could have wide acceptance not just for free press, but for free speech and more.

As a professional writer, I wish to be less anonymous. Hello, New Yorker?

As one of billions who are exposed, I doubt that I will attract any attention regardless of this technology. Perhaps they will figure out who really wrote Shakespeare's plays, but surely they will devote fewer resources to the rest of us.