I have been using one of those for about five years and love it. I switched to a track ball about 10 years ago when I started getting pain in the tendons on the back of my hand using a normal mouse.

I've also got a keyboard without a num pad meaning that I don't have to reach for the trackball - it sits where the num pad would normally be - and that stopped my right shoulder blade clicking which used to happen when I rotated my arm over the num pad for the trackball.

Simple questions that they don't understand and don't like it when that fact is highlighted publicly.

On the flip side: Being a decent software engineer doesn't make you a good web developer. I've had to deal with a site built by decent software engineers who didn't understand the web and it fell seriously short in SEO, content management, analytics, degradation and a slack handful of other stuff that's second nature to a decent web developer.

I've fixed a broken production website over SSH on a smartphone on several occasions. Sure, it's not my first choice but it sure beats dropping whatever you are doing on your day off and trying to find a computer that you can use, being stuck traveling knowing that you need to fix something and can't do anything about it or trying to talk someone else through it.

I also use it to remote admin several non mission critical servers on a regular basis - again not making wholesale changes but little things that are easier to deal with as and when they occur.

Maemo and the N900 are on page four of TFA.

From what I have seen the NBR only does some hotkey mappings, fullscreen force, and that annoying (my opinion of course) navigation thingy to get to your applications. On my eeepc 1000H I prefered to just install the full version and fix the few things wrong. Couldn't the install just run like a dmidecode and then say hey your running a netbook model blah blah blah do you want the hotkey mappings?

Last time I used steam they accepted PayPal, so that's what I use as I don't want a credit card either.

There are lots of "diceless" systems - basically rock-scissors-paper variants.

I have this wonderful image of a 6'2, 300lb tattooed muscular prisoner whining about whether his 58th level paladin's holy sword being destroyed by enchanted rust-monsters.

I actually think games like D&D are a very good thing for prisoners - it teaches a variety of new ways to interact with people and non-violent ways to let off aggression.

One of my duties in a previous job was looking after the BES and the Crackberry users. Someone once asked me if there was anything I could do as their Blackberry was waking them up when an email arrived in the middle of the night. I introduced them to the 'off' switch.

Wasting our time because he could is exactly what my boss was doing - the reports sat on his desk for a few days before going into his filing cabinet. He knew next to nothing about IT or management and was in the habit of throwing his power around to make up for his inadequacies.

I used to work for a head of department who demanded all sorts of printed monthly reports and would start getting on people's backs if it was late. Not only was it a boring time drain but it wasn't difficult to see that they didn't really know what the reports meant but weren't prepared to admit it. So for three months I handed in the same report with the headline date on the first page changed, on the fourth month I didn't hand in my reports and, when taken to task about it, took them aside and showed them the last three months reports I had haded in and the real data I had kept back. Fortunately I managed to get out of that company but I didn't produce any more routine reports after that.

I've just finished building a new website for a startup and mobile was a consideration from the start. As a result the page content is all modularised and there is a layout+css switcher for mobile devices. Some of the fancy stuff doesn't work as well or look as good on the mobile site but all the functionality is there - with and without JavaScript (progressive enhancement really comes into its own here). This means that going forward there is only one site and two layouts to maintain, a vast improvement on the last time I tried to retro-fit mobile layouts to a site and settled on a similar solution to the parent which is essentially to build a second site.

I'll echo other posters by saying that /. blows HARD on a mobile.

The T-Mobile connection manager allows you to disable image compression, it's two clicks away from the tray icon.