I rather disagree.

First, I'm 6'8, I can find out whether I fit in the car. Second, I can find out whether the build quality meets MY definitions of acceptable. Finally, I can find out if I like to drive it, for some people a half second turbolag is no big deal, for some it's a huge deal, and still others they have no idea, since they've never driven a car with a turbolag.

There are some things that are very specific to people. True story: I once went out to test drive a truck, turns out the exhaust note was smack dab on the resonant frequency of my sinuses. Despite it not being that loud in any sort of absolute sense, driving for 5 minutes gave me a splitting headache. And yet the vast majority of people had absolutely no problem with it.

Except that it is replacing work I would do on a PC.

First, let's get rid of the notion that laptops are inferior species spec wise, compared to a server, they are, compared to a high end desktop they are, but my primary computer is a laptop, this is because I spend 48 to 96 hours straight at work, so it just makes sense for me to have a computer I can take with me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my laptop, which is a higher end model, but certainly not the highest end, is superior, spec wise, to at least 80%, and probably 90% of the desktops that are in use today. And you know what I get when I put my laptop on a desk rather than my lap? A somewhat odd form factor desktop.

Second, You know what services that can't afford toughbooks do these days? The answer isn't "don't use EMR" because that's really not an option any more. They have the field employees fill out paper while they're in the truck, then when they get back to base, they have to duplicate all that information into a desktop using a variety of services (imagetrend being the 800lbs gorilla in the field).

I dunno, I had a beautiful woman asking me why I wasn't drinking with her as I finished typing up the last comment, and now I'm in the after effects of having a beautiful woman demanding that I drink with her, I'm not sure I'm making sense, but I'm pretty convinced that I'm right...but my etoh level suggests I might be full of shit.

I'll actually give you a primary source, real life example.

I'm a paramedic, every single patient for whom I have responsibility of care for, I have to generate documentation for. Up until about 2008, that meant actual paperwork, about then, the industry as a whole being phasing in electronic medical records. To the business office, they're great, because billing the patients, and keeping the records is much easier, and for me, the end user of the system, it's great because, especially when you're using a touch screen and a properly designed program, the computer is much faster and easier to use than a pen (especially for me, my handwriting sucks balls.)

Up until this point, and I imagine for a while into the future, the solution of choice has been to use the Panasonic toughbooks that will convert to a tablet form factor (CF-18s,-19 etc). The touchscreen is necessary, because we actually use it to collect signatures (quite aside from the fact that stabbing at options on the screen can easily cover 99.5% of the use cases), the portability was of course necessary, because I start my paperwork in the pt's house and finish in the ER, the keyboard was necessary because I have to type up a narrative for each pt, and the ruggedness was necessary because we beat the hell out of our machines. e problem is, even the older machines are WAY more powerful than we need, not to mention being heavy as hell (remember, I have to hand these to 96 yo pts to get a signature.)

These EMR suites are starting to be developed for tablets, both iOS and android, and the market is starting to come up with workable ruggedized tablets. nce we get over the industrial inertia we have (which is surprisingly significant, given how agile we're supposed to be), we're going to move to tablets with some sort of external keyboard (at a guess, at odds with the ruggedized tablet, the preference will be for keyboards cheap enough to be effectively disposable), and it will be the right solution for us.

No, my biller and office manager will still be using a full blown PC, but in the field, not so much.

Personally, I was hoping for Colbert building a monster truck out of TiVos and driving over the cars in the executive lot at Viacom.

Not quite.

This is about pushing the boundaries of what we can do. This is about shooting so high we're staring into the sun.

There was no reason for us to go to the moon. In and of itself, it accomplished nothing to improve the lot of humanity, but it was a hell of a thing. It made people dream, it inspired an untold amount of people to go into STEM fields, and on a more direct note, it advanced electronics tremendously.

As a race, we need to do big, audacious things. This is one of them, It should be done. It's not as big a thing as going to the Moon, but it's bigger than getting a cup of coffee.

I'm willing to bet that even if it is just as much a flop as you think it will be, (And you seem to know what you're on about, so I'm willing to concede that if it were done with the current technology, you're probably right.), inside of 20 years, it'll pay for itself in many ways, the least of which might be the power beamed back down to Earth.

Fair enough.

Buy lots of insurance, park it on the street :)

Not to detract from your point, but if you need to lower a wheel by dropping it into a pothole in order to leg down comfortably, you really should be riding a shorter bike. You ought to be able to comfortably flat foot both legs at any given stop. Your ability to quickly pull away should some asshole just not see you as they come speeding up behind is greatly enhanced by being at a good balance when you're stopped.

I take some objection to that notion. Possibly thrill seeker is a little extreme, but motorcycle riders can certainly be be categorized at least as being non-risk adverse. There is no doubt that riding a motorcycle is vastly more dangerous than driving a car, is you're someone who categorizes that as important, and especially if you're not going to counterbalance that fact in the decision making process that motorcycles are vastly more fun than cars (or as you call it, liberating), then you're not going to ride one.

I understand your desire not to be lumped in with squids, which is perhaps what GP was thinking, but motorcycle riders are thrill seekers.

Right now, btw, I have the credentials to talk about this, given that I'm currently bed confined s/p surgery to fix the leg I broke after my front tire blew out (a week and a half after I replaced both tires!)...and I'm anxious because I expect to get my bike back tomorrow so I can find out what I'm going to need to do to it to get it running by the time I'm healed.

Come now. Haven't you been paying attention to the US for the last 12 years?

They're going to label him a terrorist.

It's actually more complicated than that, there are international treaties involved in international airfare. The basic point, however, is that the 500USD ticket down there was much easier to buy when I was living in the states than the 500USD ticket back to the states was to buy while I was living down there.

Well, the difference is in the external costs.

Generally the internal costs of an area are consistent, a big mac will cost a certain percentage of the median income, no matter what that income is, but external costs are fixed.

For an example, I used to live in Honduras, the median income was 3k USD or so, the costs of food and housing were commensurate. International airfare, however, doesn't drop, nor for that matter, did the value of the student loans I still have outstanding.

I'd just like to point out that the median personal income in the US in 2012 was 42,693 USD.

I don't know where you're living, but I'd like to live there if the typical personal income is 90k.

Yeah, I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you on this.

You're missing a much more fundamental possible cause of the behavior. By and large, the drivers of rice rockets are late teens/early 20s males. Late teens/early 20s males have a couple things going on:

A) They engage in experience seeking, risk taking behaviors at a much, MUCH higher rate. The causal link between that and testosterone is the popular theory, scientifically it's still up in the air as far as I know, but I haven't really been paying attention.

B) They exhibit poor judgement. This isn't terribly surprising, given that judgement tends to grow out of experience, and they just don't have that much of it.

In short, late teens/early 20s males, myself included, have been driving like assholes for longer than the video games you want to blame it on have been around. I haven't really spent much time talking to any of them about it, so it's possible that's how they're justifying their stupid driving practices these days, but it's not what's causing it. Me, I just claimed to have superior situational awareness and car control, I didn't even bother trying to justify that accidents are caused by people who failed to come up to my mark...I didn't care about them.

Thankfully, as I look back, I don't think I caused any accidents, but that's really through no credit to myself.

I'll grant you the need/want thing, I should know better than to engage in inexactitudes of language.

As far as the distraction issue, it all comes down to a matter of prioritization. There are times I absolutely cannot take my eyes off the road ahead of me, when I'm going through blind curves or cresting hills, when I'm moving through an intersection, when I'm moving through a zone of merging, when I'm in a residential neighborhood filled with suicidal children (all children are suicidal), or any number of other situations in which the potential for rapidly changing road hazards exists. There are times when I absolutely can take my eyes off the road for a second, for example, when I'm on a long straightaway, without any vehicles close to me or I'm sitting at a stoplight, with no one coming up behind me any time soon. Currently I use that time to check my blind spots, check my speed to make sure I haven't creeped up further over the limit than I'm comfortable betting the police won't stop me (I never need to look at my speedometer to determine whether or not I'm driving at a safe speed.), check my odometer and figure out how much fuel I have, and after everything has been done, and I have some time before I need to repeat any of it, I'll look around at the scenery...why shouldn't I wedge check the map and read any alerts in there, especially given that doing either one leaves the roadway in my peripheral vision, which, for example checking my blind spots doesn't?

As for the first point, it's a fair concern. However, there's already a solution on the market for that, active noise canceling microphones, in fact, my helmet has a hard mount for one built in. I've never used one myself, but from what I understand, they work rather well, though not perfectly, as the wind noise is rather, though not perfectly steady. Whether or not the remaining noise is enough to overcome the STT tech, I don't know, but I'm hoping not, with, I think, some reasonable justification, given the ability of google voice to comprehend me when I'm in an ambulance (which has a huge and noisy diesel engine) doing 90 MPH without a noise canceling headset. I'm reasonably sure that by spending a fair bit of time doing training, it will understand me tolerably well, at least over the crucial commends. Even if not, though, there's still use to it, if I can just set the google maps up before I start riding, and have it scroll any alerts across the top (which I believe I've seen "screenshots" of it doing, but I can't find right now), that will absolutely fill my need.

The second point, however, doesn't have much to say for itself. As it stands, I wear two different kinds of glasses while I ride. First are my corrective lenses, which I wear when my contacts are acting up, those just stay in place, between the ear hooks and the pressure that the helmet places on the side of my head, they don't move. The second, and more common, are a pair of cheap sunglasses, wince they have more or less straight bows, they do move some, but probably not enough to be irritating were they providing a HUD. Admittedly, though, the Glass is likely to be much heavier, and thus will move more...so it's probably fortuitous that I've already solved that problem by putting a couple of wedges/shims that are mounted to the faceplate (not visor) that comfortably hold them in place.

Here's the one you missed that's a much bigger concern than either of the points you raised...will Glass fit under my helmet without requiring modifications that will compromise the safety of the helmet? God I hope so, but there's really no way of telling until they hit the market and I can try both on at the same time.