Nobody's saying PCs will go away any time soon (well, except maybe that sensationalist headline). But you have to ask yourself how many people have that same need you do, versus the number that, say, need to play Angry Birds? And even people who do need to write a lot, what is the balance of time spent in that activity vs more casual comsumption activities? If the aggregate demand for casual experiences outstrips that for serious productivity experiences, then it stands to reason devices that cater to the former will eventually outnumber those that target the latter.

Maybe because Slashdot's system for posting sucks and is stuck in the 1990's? Why is there no way to log in *when* you post something? If you've written a nice long informative post then realize you weren't logged in, logging in at that point totally loses your context: the story you were looking at, the post you were responding to, and the response you'd already written. I don't see why Slashdot still makes this such a pain.

You need to learn about exponential curves, sonny. Production has been increasing since its discovery, yes, but so has demand. Both have been increasing roughly exponentially. But one of those curves is about to start going down, while the other will continue to try to go up. A video you should probably watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

Lots of things conduct besides fingers. Could be the paper was treated with dots of some conductive ink. You could use the relative locations of a pattern of conductive dots (which the iPad would interpret as multiple "fingers") to encode a bit of information that tells you what a particular object is. I haven't seen the actual video, but within limits, certainly seems feasible to me that you could do Surface-like things on an iPad. One main limitation will be the maximum number of contacts that the iPad tracks. A lot of multitouch systems max out at 4 touches, some at 10 touches. Not sure what the max is on the iPad.

Better link about LaserTouch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne_QgTKjnMg

This basically appears to be a mobile version of "LaserTouch" that was done at Microsoft Research in 2008. I wonder if he's added anything to that? http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/23/microsofts-lasertouch-prototype-brings-hand-control-to-any-disp/

Is computing geodesic distances any sort of bottleneck for anyone? I find it hard to believe that it would be. If that's the case, then you may have a hard time getting it published. Amdahl's law and all, a 10x speedup in something that represents only 1% of the total time of an algorithm gives you less than a 1% speedup of the overall system. The other point I haven't seen anyone make, is that if it's a common problem, then chances are the math for the proper solution is already known (especially if you really are just talking about finding the shortest distance between two points on a sphere). It's very unlikely that you've invented a new way of doing something as common as computing distance between two points on a sphere. You should talk with some people who do geology or geostatistics or oceanography or the like to check if what you've done is really novel.

It doesn't sound to me like Apple wants people to jailbreak their devices. Apparently it says you are a criminal if you do so.

Anyway, you are being pedantic. Clearly there are risks and inconveniences associated with running a jailbroken phone. I'm guessing once you restore your device to the factory defaults you will no longer be able to run all those great jailbreak-only apps you bought, and you'll have to go reinstall them again later after you re-install the jailbreak patch. If Apple hasn't figured out a way to disable jailbreaking altogether, that is. Hardly a level playing field with apps from iTunes.

Thinking about it, part of the reason it annoys me is because Microsoft was declared a monopolist simply for including a browser with their operating system. This basically hurt no one except other browser makers. So if you're going to call that anti-competitive then you've got to call Apple's cornering the market on the sale of all types of apps to be anti-competitive too. But I honestly don't really think Microsoft deserved to be penalized for trying to give their users a better experience than they would have with a browser-less OS. Like the Apple apologists here are saying, if the market didn't like what Microsoft was doing, they could have bought Macs or used Linux instead.

In one sense Apple is doing much the same thing as HP only allowing you to buy ink from HP, or Gillette only allowing you to buy blades from Gillette, or Nesspresso only letting you use Nesspresso pods in their coffee machines. I'm not really wild about those monopolies either. But to me this feels more like Panasonic not letting you buy food for your Panasonic microwave from anyone but them. It just seems wrong. At least for the microwave example I would hope people would have the sense to complain and not buy such a product. Anyone know if Android apps be gotten from anywhere you like? And anyone know what Windows Phone 7 will do about apps?

I may have this wrong -- I'm not an iPhone owner -- but I was under the impression that the only way to get apps (real apps, not browser-based apps) on the iPhone was to get them from iTunes. Only if you jailbreak your phone (which Apple says is illegal) can you get apps from other sources. Is that not correct? I looked at saurik.com but it does not look like software aimed at normal users (it mentions in the FAQ that most of the software there is commandline tools or development libraries).

Gee, maybe it's because there are other stores where we can buy food?

They are like a grocer who has a monopoly on where you can buy your food. I would be perfectly happy with Apple being as autocratic as they like with their app store if it weren't the *only* source for apps for their platforms. It seems blatantly anticompetitive to me. Consider if Microsoft decided you could only buy Windows apps through them. It would never be allowed. Apple is seriously strolling right down the path toward a massive DOJ action against them.

Found this presentation about the tech behind this: http://www.sidchapters.org/pacificnorthwest/meetings/apr01_09_presentation.pdf

You just track more than one pair of eyes. I believe the device is capable of displaying more than 2 views. There's sure to be some limit, though. Probably won't ever be able to have the whole extended family crowded around the screen with tech like this. But 4 or 6 eyes shouldn't be too much of a problem.

There is a market for news, so the "news industry" is not going to fail. What will die will be ways of monetizing the news that don't make sense any more. The more you prop up news organizations using bad revenue models, the harder you make it for new viable plans to compete.