Seriously, if we are so stupid that we can't see how dangerous this is for our species we deserve to be wiped out in a horrendous antibiotic resistant plague.

Oh, wait...

###### no carrier ######

Great. Now I'll get spam and google ads related to the content of my last few phone calls.

[calls Mum]

[next email]

"Hello, would you like a reminder service to tell you to make more phone calls?"

...hmm... not for me

I don't have time to even try to run a gaming PC any more. Just too much hassle. And no - to those that say "it got easier with whatever version of windows is out now" - I don't care. I have more important things to do with my life than buy graphics cards costing more than a PS3 & Xbox combined and find the drivers for all the peripherals and make it all work. Been there, tried it, had numerous favourite games stop working because of Direct X blah de blah... Had an entire force feedback steering wheel stop working because drivers were no longer made. You won't catch me again. It's over...

It's such basic science that you can do it in your kitchen. Take a look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8394168.stm and see a simple experiment you can replicate yourself

I just came back from a conference in France including a maker faire element. Plenty of geeky/artistic women there, and you'll have a huge amount of fun. Just go with an open mind, and try things you wouldn't normally do. Another thing to try might be http://dorkbot.org/ - kinda hard to describe - they do "strange things with electricity" but another creative/tech mix. Take a look and see if there is a group near you.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Of course no-one would complain if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft has probably caused each individual slashdotter many many man-hours (months? years?) of pain and anguish trying to make a stupid DOS|Windows|Win NT|Win95|Win98|Win2000|WinXP|etc... machine work as it should do. Hell I remember how difficult it was to get the Network edition of Windows 3.11 to do TCP/IP!!! Even if we abandoned Microsoft for more reliable alternatives, it continued to cause us pain because of friends and family who needed our help and we couldn't refuse.

I repeat, if Microsoft had made a reliable fast product (I still feel sad that OS/2 died), no-one would be complaining. So, yes, given that Gates was personally responsible for running the company that made many many hours of our lives a misery with a thoroughly mediocre OS, I would say quite a few of us have a problem with him for good reasons.

And no, having made your money as a convicted monopolist, spending it in a philanthropic way does not remove the reasons to dislike him. I am glad that, having made billions of dollars, he is spending it in this way, but I would much rather he hadn't made it in the first place, and just maybe, we would have had a very different software industry based on sharing of code and tools that people in the third world could have afforded to join.

You're right. I once used a sci-fi Novel by Brian Aldiss to prove that a concept wasn't new. For controlling with other appendages take a look at www.fufme.com - this has been around since the dot.com boom

Don't you think Jeff Han might just have some prior art on this? This link http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html shows his multitouch interface more than a year before Apple came out with their iPhone and before the Apple patent was filed.