When it was first announced (5 years ago now?), I thought the Optimus Maximus keyboard was going to solve this problem. With a little smarts built into the keyboard I wouldn't mind esoteric key combinations if the result was displayed directly on the keyboard. Something like this might, someday, be the solution but at $1500 dollars it's going to be a while and assuming a direct-brain interface doesn't come first.

The fact that there's still people there is just another example of the extreme cowardice of the right wing. When we actually tried to get some of those guys in front of a real court of law all the tough Republicans started crying about the danger. Republicans, man up! Stand up for the Constitution; all of it, not just the 2nd Amendment. Stop pissing your pants.

And tomorrow they'll advertise "up to 100 mbit/s". That's the awesome thing about this gimmick, Comcast can double their advertised speed every year without actually spending any money on infrastructure.

I can hear the tea baggers screaming from here, "Obama's socializin' the interwebs!"

What I want is a blog post that actually explains all the various mapping licenses. Preferably in a simple table format. I don't like to read.

"A stock is a portion of ownership of the company."

While that may be technically true, if there's no dividend the value of their ownership is your yearly vote in your various shareholder meetings (you do vote, don't you?). Stocks are at the bottom of the barrel if the company goes belly up -- behind bonds, creditors and just about everyone else.

And, there is no inherent problem with this on face value. Stocks are stocks. More volatile and therefore more risk but also more potential rewards than bonds or your FDIC-insured savings account.

The problem comes from how this statement has distorted politics. Politicians have convinced the masses that we are all part of an ownership society, to own a stock is to be as good as a CEO and that the rules that are good for Murdoch or Fuld or Paulson are also good for factory workers, computer programmers and waiters. That's how we got a country where taxes on income from useful, productive work are higher than taxes on idle non-productive wealth. We have an entire political party organized around protecting millionaires estates and dividends and a second political party that is afraid to stand up to them.

Yes; at least in the macro sense. If you limited the set of potential programmers to only those high school students who are inclined to pick a programming book at random from a bookstore and teach themselves -- without help from family, friends or the school -- to be programmers then you are going to end up with a very small number of programmers.

Exactly. In a slightly more perfect world the government of Afghanistan would try to implement a version of the Alaska Permanent Fund. But, that didn't happen in Iraq, why would it happen in there. Instead the profits are going to go to foreign corporations and local corruption, just like in Africa.

This is probably more of a hardware problem than an OS problem (Android, iPad or whatever) but what I would like to see in a tablet is Wacom-quality inputs. All the tablets appear to be platforms for consuming entertainment (music, movies, social networks, apps and books) that other people have created for you. I would like to be able to create on a tablet by painting, handwriting, or sketching directly on the screen.

I've only used an iPad for 10 minutes and I've never had a chance to work with an android tablet so I'm curious, how far away is that technology?

...it's already in the shop after only 10 miles. The dealer refused to take the car back...

Don't most states have a Lemon Law?

(Sorry for the delay)

I should have been more clear. A linked list (implemented as a dequeue, I think) provides for O(1) efficiency for insertions and deletions while an array list is O(N). However, an array list allows for O(1) for random access while a linked list is O(N). You use different list types for different tasks.

The vector is an old version of an array list this is synchronized. The current, correct way of indicating a synchronized data structure is to wrap it on one of the "Collections" wrappers.

But, don't get me wrong. I'm loving working in Ruby but it doesn't make Java inherently wrong, just different.

Great! Give corporations 1st amendment rights but no taxes... that's a winner. Our founding fathers declared "no taxation without representation", but we should be telling the corporate lobbyists and their congressional lackeys "no representation without taxation."

I love the artistic -- almost poetry -- of well-written Ruby. But the verboseness of Java can be helpful for long term code maintenance (this is assuming the programmer writing the code is aware of what the various constructs mean.)

Java:
// Hey code maintainers, I'll probably be doing inserts and deletions with this list
List list1 = new LinkedList();

// Hey code maintainers, I may be doing a lot of random access with this list
List list2 = new ArrayList();

// Hey code maintainers, either: // a. I haven't learned any new Java since 1.1 or // b. I really need a synchronized, random access list
List list3 = new Vector();

// Hey code maintainers, I need a synchronized, random access list
List list4 = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList());

This is versus your Ruby example; concise, but not very implicit information.

Ruby:

# I'm informing my readers that I need a list
myList = []

Thank you to the two answers so far.

The PDA approach might be worth a try. I haven't used one since the old Handspring and I can't imagine my client (ie. my wife) willing to migrate her note taking to meet the Palm "graffiti-style". Do modern PDA's handle handwriting better?

As far as the laptop, as a psychiatrist she's talking with her patients in a more friendly face-to-face setting and she's worried that typing is far more intrusive than writing. That being said, a laptop caddy and a small laptop set-up next to her chair might be our inevitable solution.