By "confirmed the feature last night", did you mean:

"confirmed their intention to include an interesting feature, which in all likelihood will be dropped in the last quarter before release because other issues critical to the fundamental infrastructure of the OS have been discovered and will require 110% of effort in order to result in an acceptable basic release?"

I've been trying to learn Spanish lately - my corpspeak is seeming pretty fluent.

Plus, there are hardware based differences in interaction that modify your reading/interaction behavior. Analyzing mouse cursor movements for a trackball, mouse, and touchpad will likely give very different results - and that's assuming they're being moved the same way. When I'm reading with a mouse, I tend to 'follow along' on the page - with a trackball, I park the cursor to the side - with a touchpad, I tend to move in blocks. Add enough variables, and you can model any behavior (at the risk of losing the ability to probe correlation of real factors) - by adding enough exceptions to the algorithm to handle all these cases (and all the others) it strikes me as unlikely that the algo would be able to distinguish between humans and bots.

And if it does, the spammers will probably write a trojan that watches for the user generating a login, and swaps the interaction with the captcha the spammer wants solved. Reminds me of the good ole days of Cold War Arms Racing!

People keep citing technology as a reason that the classroom will be obsolete, and following the basic premise that you've laid out: the lecture is canned, I could watch a video and get the same result. (I'm not ignoring the rest of your points, but I do want to respond to that one.)

The current trend in educational technology is just the opposite - it's an attempt to make the dialog more symmetric (note: I did not say completely symmetric, and it should not be!) Student response systems (aka Clickers) allow instructors to get a more real-time feedback about how well a class has understood a topic, and allows us to adjust our delivery/explanation approach, and reallocate time from mastered to unmastered topics. Online homework systems help large classes still receive feedback regarding their progression through the topic, and 'shrink' the size of the class (my 140 person class gets interaction that feels more like a 40 person class).

That's not to say that we've reached a new steady state, and it's not an advocacy for large class sizes. However, I hope that these passing examples point out that when properly used, technology can help make the classroom more relevant than a video file. There will certainly be a growing-in period for the technologies and their uses to mature, and I do think we're in the early stages of that now, but I see a lot of faculty growing beyond 'PowerPointless' presentations and that's a good start!

Or to work for perfectly competent people who are part of the same company as an idiotic HR department. Clearly, this case is rare as demonstrated by the lack of Dilbert comics depicting HR as ninnies.

Unfortunately, I suspect that we've Slashdotted Senate! Anyone happen to have an email address for her office (not a webform)?

In this context, I guess that makes you a real Moroni!

It's not a bad plan, but I'd shorten the reinstall time even further by setting up a backup image of the OS+programs after a reinstall, and park it on the RAID. Then, your time spent is limited to the transfer rate between the two drives.

Remember your offline backups of the RAID as well though - otherwise you may simply end up with a well-preserved virus refuge.

And if your metabolism allow it (mine used to), there are other health problems to consider. I had to have kidney stones removed surgically by 23 due in part to the too-high concentration of caffeine, dehydration, and high mineral content in the component water back when I used to drink 2 Double Gulps of Mt. Dew/Surge, plus assorted cans of soda during the day.

Surgery = bad. Surgery - incisions = really not fun (it's the kidney, and there're ways to reach it without cutting. RotoRooter. Think about it, then think about reducing your intake instead...)

That made for a rough few months...

The killer app for a system like this (though not these specific systems, since they all still expect contact between the device and a wires/dongle) would be in-car power. I personally like to have my GPS in the upper-left corner of the windshield (U.S. driving) and have to make a special effort to ensure that the wire is out of my sight-line. A system that doesn't require dongles in-contact with the wireless power source would be ideal, especially since the devices most people use in-car use small currents (mp3 players, GPS, cell recharging, etc.) So, there is a point in this particular market from my perspective.