That's right, I remember my mother-in-law saying she really wanted the Note for that exact reason.

It'll be interesting to see if more physical interface/touchscreen options gain popularity.

The first thing that occurred to me was games for children who may be too young to interact with only a touchscreen.

I mean, if you can make anything an input device regardless of whether it has a circuit in it, I guess you can dream up a lot. I'm just not brainstorming well today or something.

So we make touchscreens so we can use only our hands for natural interfaces....and then create things to put in our hands again?

This is kinda what I was thinking. I don't know enough about low level hardware interaction to answer this, but I would think its logical to assume trade-offs.

I mean, could we really increase the number of cores, increase performance, and lower battery life all at once (lets assume battery technology stays the same for ten years and remains constant even though it wont)?

I was thinking adding cores would do little in raw performance other than making the phone more adaptable to different use cases (multi-processing certain apps/services) and better at doing nothing more efficiently (idle). But like I said, not a hardware guy. I would like to know how a chip with 48 cores compares to a chip with say 16 cores in terms of benchmarks. Surely with more cores each core is less powerful right?

In a capitalistic society, organizations follow a survivalistic way of operating unless kept in check by the people purchasing their products. As a result, I have to blame the society that isn't keeping these organization in check by being cognoscente of the issues mentioned.

Why should people get off so easily? What good does it do a society to just allow people to consume technology services like zombies and then demand that organizations treat the zombies better?

Raise awareness, promote consciousness, and force organizations to operate in a more ethical way.

The only mainstream hacking I ever hear about is usually "protest" hacking or "shock and awe" hacking against major organizations.

I really hope the FBI is focusing more on improving their own cyber warfare capability against countries such as China that may have insidious intentions for our vulnerabilities.

I mean, if Playstation Network gets hacked I guess its a sad day, but I really hope they're working above that level of hacking at this point.

I would like to see their sales forecasting. I mean outside of Apple, you've still got the Nook, the Fire, the Nexxus, and a plethora of other Android tablets eating up market share. Add the iPad Mini and the new HP Envy and I really don't see how this could go well for them.

Surface doesn't have any real competitive edge other than working with other Microsoft products (which is closer to a disadvantage IMHO).

I agree, I don't fully understand why Microsoft tries to appeal to end users. The decision to jump in to the tablet market this late in the game fighting a market inflated with Apple and Android tablets just seems desperate. Also, HP is jumping back in to the game with Envy after making us think they were done with end user devices.

Tablets do have a limited use case, but from the perspective of these four companies they are all that matters right now.

I think the problem with questions like this is that it seems to underrate the complexity of learning and teaching. I was homeschooled until college and the vast majority of my learning before college involved me working through books and watching video lectures alone, but individual comprehension efforts are only one part of a holistic learning effort and you still need peering or someone to ask questions along the way.

Before college, I would say this isn't as important due to the ease of learning pre-college concepts, but at the college level I think peering is important for developing deep, thorough comprehension. You simply need someone to converse with in a natural, humanistic way that is able to provide more insight in to a topic whether this person is a teacher or a fellow peer. So unless human level AI is developed, we can't fully expect to replace the concept, but I think we can certainly change the way learning and teaching is conducted.

Lastly, sometimes I wonder if teachers are needed at younger levels like grades 1-5 as anything more than just facilitators or babysitters. It would seem like technology could replace a teacher at this level simply because of the nature of the concepts being so simplistic. I could see children in the future going to school (or heaven forbid working from home) and working in some holistic learning sim for 3-4 hours a day with maybe 1-2 teachers overseeing progress for like 150 kids. My wife used to be a 5th grade teacher and the amount of fluff time spent trying to get a class to learn a simple concept or fact was just mind blowing to me.

Well clearly...so will yours if we're making unqualified statements...care to attach a timeline or anything to qualify that at all?

I was meaning in the next year or so. IT itself has to commoditize more before I go away...

And I believe I mentioned the need for a timeline in my post when I said "I have no idea how many years these are going to last in the IT domain" which you clearly ignored in order to tell me I'm being replaced by touchscreens? Dates? Facts? Theories? Anything other than worthless buggy whip anecdotes?

This is pretty much how I feel exactly. I love a tablet for reading a book, or casual web surfing, watching a quick a TV show in bed etc. The interface just seem superior to me for these types of activities and its a nice break for someone who uses a keyboard and mouse about 10 hours per day (IT position).

At the same time, I could never do away with my desktop or laptop, tablets will never replace these for me in their current state.

I really would like to see widespread adaption of the Transformer Prime concept (or maybe even the Windows Surface tablet), where a physical keyboard is integrated as part of the device instead of as a clunky after-thought solution. At that point, I could do without my laptop and be satisfied with a desktop and a tablet hybrid.

I agree, I have plenty of touchscreen devices but they're just additions.

Contrast this with my non-technical wife and her parents who almost exclusively use tablets and smartphones.

There's no way I could do my job without a keyboard (IT).

I think its totally plausible for the classic interface tools to disappear from the consumer market, but I have no idea how many years these are going to last in the IT domain.

Thanks for the discussion and goodluck in your endeavor!

Thanks for the link, I've finally found time to watch the video in its entirely and I agree with your assessment. Dawkins does make a compelling case.

Its almost as if the only effect religion has on morality is to encourage people to create a facade morality full of lies when in reality empathy and the need to survive constantly balance the good and bad things well all do.

Thanks again.