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.
You know, stuff that everyone else just doesn't understand.
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.
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.
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
Old programmers never die, they just hit account block limit.